Prepare your SEO for Yahoo-Microsoft merger

In case you haven’t heard, Yahoo and Microsoft are teaming up to create a formidable rival for Google.

With this partnership, Microsoft’s Bing will handle the back-end of the project while Yahoo will handle front-end design. The arrangement should materialize in 2010.

This will present a dilemma for some search engine optimization (SEO) companies. As explained by Chris Crum from WebProNews:

“With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, webmasters are going to need to evaluate their need to address their own sites with regards to optimizing for Bing. While optimizing for Bing is generally a good idea anyway, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo Search, are going to want to give this some special attention.”

Theoretically, if you won’t be affected if you rank well in Yahoo now and you don’t rank well in Bing. However, when the change comes, the rank differences will have an effect.

The general advice is to figure out which keywords work well for you in Yahoo and work on raising these rankings.

“With the way Bing displays search results for these queries, ranking 6-10 is significantly less valuable,” writes David Shapiro, a search strategist for iCrossing. “Bing returns the top five results for the primary keyword you entered, then displays the top three results for up to five related terms, providing a list of 20 possible listings for the user to select.”

He continues: “If you currently rank 6-10 for any of these keywords you should work on building links to move up into the top five, and focus on achieving top three results for the terms that Bing has chosen for the Quick Tabs, especially considering these terms are more targeted and likely convert better.”

Source: WebProNews, iCrossing