Yahoo! is scheduled to start serving organic search results from
the Microsoft Bing search engine in August, with
their paid search ads migrating to Microsoft's adCenter soon
after. For manufacturing eCommerce websites, this is going to
bring about significant change in the search engine market.
The Bing/Yahoo partnership could easily take about 30%
of Google's search market, so here's a few search engine
optimization tips for companies with eCommerce websites
to take a look at:
- Microsoft adCenter - it has better e-commerce demographics
and a significantly better conversion rate than Google
AdWords. Expect adCenter to be really cooking for the
2010 holiday shopping season, or in the beginning of 2011 at the
latest.
- Web Sitemap - Some suggest that Bing searches rely more on
sitemaps than Google. Your sitemap should kept up to date
with the latest information about your business anyway, but
especially now considering the talk about the Bing algorithm
and sitemaps.
- Bing Webmaster tools - You can see the crawling data and other
site status, as well as the domain score, page scores and the
estimated number of indexed pages. The tool creates a list of
inbound links and outbound link URLs.
As always, I recommend a lean web continual improvement program
that focuses on the manufacturing website content and page meta
information. An effective web Kaizen loop with web analytics
from both Google Analytics and Bing can easily be implented to keep
your website up to date and providing the best value to your
customers.