Bing is Microsoft's new upgrade of its search engine LIVE search. Infact, LIVE is now Bing. Live.com is redireded to the new search engine. So what's new? Bing promises to make search easier by allowing a searcher to drill down through the search results until they find exactly what they want. Searchers looking to shop for something (say a digital camera) or book a flight or hotel can get directions, price ranges, specials, and even categories of different types of travel (cheap, luxury, oceanfront, etc).

So the big difference? Most other Search Engines want to give you the best results for your search the first time (whether they really are or not is debateable) and then pass you along to that website. Bing is different. It wants you to keep plugging around until you find exactly what you want (you do your research and reviews within the results page so to speak).

From an SEO standpoint, this means top rankings aren't as weighted as significantly in Bing as in a traditional search engine's results page (though it shouldn't be outright ignored). Why? Because your top ranked page, say for the term "Myrtle Beach hotel" is competing with "clarification" content. Bing says, ok – here are some hotels – but which kind of hotel do you want? Did you really want a condo? Did you really mean North Myrtle Beach?

For Bing rankings I imaginee (if their premise works) that terms will be more long tailed, traffic more qualified so much less quantity (amount of traffic), and the conversions should be higher.

I'm not exactly sure how their PAID ADS measure into all this "drilling down" of content? Or how your analytics would actually track which keyword phrase the visitor came to your site from. If I started with searching for "Myrtle Beach hotels" and ended up drilling down to "cheap Myrtle Beach hotel on the oceanfront" which keyword is actually tagged for drawing the traffic to your website? And better yet – which phrase should you optimize for?

For all you webmaster concerned with the new quality guidelines of Bing.com (not so far off from Live.com's quality guidelines), please read Microsoft Bing Quality Guidelines.

Microsoft is a big player, so it's never a good idea to figure them out of your SEO equation (even though their search market share is nominal compared to Google and Yahoo). If you need a current assessment of your website and how it measures up in the search engines, contact InterCoastal Net Designs today, a North Carolina SEO company.