The UK now has it very own version of Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft.

The latest version of the search engine was launched last Friday. It allows users to search for UK specific results.

Microsoft’s UK head of consumer and online, Ashley Highfield said:

‘This is a serious, long-term commitment from Microsoft to put a differentiated search product in to the market place. We have not just used the US version of Bing. We’ve had a UK team focusing on what will work particularly well over here.’

‘Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the internet proving very popular.’

‘This is by no means the end of our development. We will continue to innovate and introduce new features on an ongoing basis by listening and responding to what UK search users find relevant. Removing our beta tag is merely the first step to signal Bing is here and already has features that are superior to those provided by other search engines.’

In the states Bing launched in May and they have managed to gain an increase of 7% of the search market between September and October.

The initial signs are that Bing is doing well. It is still no competition for Google but it is making a tiny mark. Its nearest rival is Yahoo who has 3.27% of the search market in the UK. Bing has 2.75% and Google has 92.06% so there is still some way to go.

Microsoft and Yahoo are teaming up. Bing will eventually be taking over all of Yahoo’s search business. Previously search engine optimisation concentrated on Google as Yahoo only had a 9% share of searchers and Microsoft only 6%. The new combination and the likelihood that the new Bing will keep increasing its share means that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has to pay more attention.

A recent document published by Bing for webmasters reiterates the importance of optimising your website for all the search engines. Bing says:

‘If webmasters don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard we try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.’

1) Keywords. There has been a lot of talk recently that keywords are not as relevant as they once were. Not so for Bing who have reiterated their importance. Choosing and using your main keywords is essential to the correct optimisation of your site but so is making sure that your writing is natural. Keywords should ‘pepper’ your pages not be stuffed in there willy-nilly.

2) Titles. Bing likes unique titles and meta descriptions for each page.

Your page title tags are what search engines use as the link and main title of a page’s listing. Its the first port of call so they need to be good.

Having unique titles enables more of your pages to be ranked for relevance. Your titles need to reflect the content of the pages you are submitting. Important keywords need to be within the page content and in the title tag too.

Meta descriptions should describe what your page is about. Again relevant keywords that reflect your page’s content need to appear in the meta descriptions.

3) Inbound links from sites that have your keywords in the title tag. The purpose of this is so that sites that are linked are as relevant to each other as possible. This provides a relevant user experience. If you are looking for widgets and have found a site that sells them you are more likely to click on a link for other widgets than you are any other link on that site.

Writing well informed and relevant content is a good way to get inbound links. Other sites will want to help their readers by sending them to you. It takes time to build an audience this way but the results are worth it.

4) Ethical link-building campaign. Don’t use spam link tactics or buy links. These are ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation techniques which Bing will not approve of. Black hat techniques are for the desperate or the ill-informed.

5) Submit to Bing. If your site is new or has been altered in anyway it is important to submit it to Bing. This seems obvious but it is surprising how many companies fail to do this. You will still be searched if you do not submit your site but doing so should increase the speed at which you are trawled.

6) Use Bings tools: The Bing Webmaster Center offers lots of information to help with website optimisation.

As reported by Propero Digital, Microsoft launched its new look search engine, Bing last month. In an attempt to capitalise on its launch it ran a jingle competition. The result – Bing Goes The Internet – a dreadful but amusing video which has sparked a great deal of online buzz for Microsoft.

The video was made by Johnathan Mann who has set himself the mission of producing one YouTube video a day. The Bing jingle is the 202nd.

Microsoft has done well with this in many ways by gaining huge amounts of publicity – good and bad. What are the lessons we can learn from this?

Engage Your Audience
Thousands of people responded to the call for a jingle. People like to be involved. Asking for help can give your company a human face.

Use Social Media to Your Advantage
People like to interact online. Microsoft used people from their community forums to ask for help. They used YouTube, already hugely popular, to host the competition. They then allowed people to vote for their favourite tune and then to discuss the winner. Blogs all over the world then commented and spread the word of Bing further. In other words all forms of social media were involved to best effect.

Cost Effective Marketing
The competition winner received $500 for his trouble. What a coup for Microsoft! Although they could also have run this competition and not offered any reward at all and there would have been plenty of entrants.

On the Downside
Many have criticised Microsoft for their Bing Jingle campaign. Critics say that it is so tacky that it has not helped them in their attempt to catch up with Google but has in fact detracted from their efforts.

Critics of Bing say that people are happy with Google and that the new search engine does not provide anything spectacularly different that would encourage others to move to it.

In response, Google have recently released information about how they are currently developing their new algorithms for Google Caffeine which has more update content than currently available on the standard Google search engines.

A Word of Warning
We need to decide what we are trying to achieve.  Bing Goes the Internet is tacky (although annoyingly catchy) but it has created attention for Bing.  But how might negative attention attention affect your company?  Microsoft is large and can take knock backs and criticism but smaller companies can rely on their reputations.  Reputation management is important. After the jingle uproar Microsoft were careful to add that the winner was chosen by the public.  50% from votes and 50% from online viewing figures.

Those you think that all publicity is good publicity could be along the right lines in this instance. One of the marketing aims of social media is to drive traffic to your site. For Bing to become popular it needs to be seen and tried out. What better way for this to happen than to drive a lot of traffic its way via the buzz of viral marketing that the Bing Jingle has created.  But is it good enough to keep people away from Google? Time will tell.