Most people think about Google when they hear the term ‘search engine’. This is obviously because Google is the most popular website on the internet. It gets more than 6 billion searches every single day. Clearly, it is the search engine that controls the internet. This begs the question; should you optimize your site for smaller search engines like Yahoo and Bing? For most website owners, SEO is all about Google, nothing else.

Optimizing your site for Yahoo and Bing can greatly increase your traffic. This because these search engines get around 29% of all searches performed on the internet. As you can imagine, this holds a lot of untapped potential. Therefore, optimizing your site for these two search engines is not a waste of time as most webmasters and bloggers think. It is a great SEO strategy for people who want to get the most out of their websites.

It takes a lot of time to optimize a site for Google and the same is true for Yahoo and Bing. Let nobody fool you that will be easy to optimize your site for smaller engines. It will take extra time and effort. Moreover, the ranking criteria on these sites is quite different from that on Google so you might have to do some research. But once your website is on the top, the number of people visiting your site will increase tremendously.

The search engines change their algorithm from time to time. Your site may be among the top search engine results today, but nowhere to be seen tomorrow due to these changes. If you spend all your time optimizing your site for Google only, a change in algorithm can lead to a drastic decrease in traffic. However, if you optimized your site for Yahoo and Bing too, you will still receive high traffic from these search engines. Optimizing for Google only is like putting all your eggs in one basket. This is because you don’t know when Google will suddenly decide not to acknowledge all the work you have done to optimize your site.

Optimizing for Yahoo and Bing

If you have decided to optimize your site for Yahoo and Bing, it will be helpful to learn a few facts about these two search engines. Some of the useful facts include:

1. Yahoo is powered by Bing. Therefore, if you optimize your site for one of these search engines, your ranking in the other one will most likely increase without any additional effort.

2. The algorithms used by Bing and Google are similar in many ways e.g. high quality backlinks and optimization of domain names are important in both search engines.

3. Like Google, Bing tends to favor old websites with official TLDs such as .org, .gov or .edu.

4. Compared to Google, Bing has an easier time when indexing flash media.

5. Bing favors smaller businesses when one performs a local search. Google on the other hand favors larger, more established businesses. This is because Bing assumes that you are looking for the most proximal business. The most proximal may not be the largest business in town.

You should optimize your site for Bing and Yahoo if you want to maximize the traffic to your site. The benefits are definitely worth the effort.