Microsoft's Bing search engine is the second most relevant Internet search engine on the market in Western Europe. Just like Google, Bing has its own index. The functioning of the search engine includes the following metrics:
- Crawling: Bing uses spiders, or web crawlers, to search the Internet for web pages and gather information. In doing so, they follow links from page to page.
- Rendering: Similar to Google, collected web pages are rendered by Bing for display in search results, taking JavaScript and CSS content into account.
- Indexing: Bing creates its own index of the collected information, taking into account factors such as content quality, keyword usage, search intent, and all sorts of technical SEO specifications.
SEO for the Bing search engine
The SEO relevance of Bing cannot be underestimated. Although Google is the dominant search engine, many users use Bing as an alternative. This makes optimizing for Bing a smart strategy to reach a wider audience. Certainly, the cooperation between Microsoft and OpenAI in the form of the AI application ChatGPT has contributed to the awareness.
Significant differences between Bing and Google are:
- Algorithm: Bing and Google have different ranking algorithms, which can lead to different search results. For example, Bing puts more emphasis on the use of meta keywords.
- Market share: Google has a larger global market share than Bing, so Google's traffic volume tends to be higher.
- Partnerships: Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft products such as Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge. This leads to a certain user base.
Besides Bing, there are es other search engines with their own index, such as DuckDuckGo, Yandex and Baidu, which are popular in different regions. The choice of search engine optimization strategy depends on the target audience and market conditions.