Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a kingdom.  And in this kingdom there was a single king.  His name was Google.  There were other nearby kingdoms, called Yahoo and MSN Live Search, but they were so small and inconsequential that none of the peasants bothered to go there.  The common man worshipped at the altar of King Google.  The people knew how to please him, how to draw his attention and praise, how to earn his favor.  They also knew what made King Google angry, what would get them excommunicated from the Googleverse forever (or maybe a year).

Then suddenly a new kingdom rose from the ashes of the MSN Live Search kingdom.  The new land declared itself BING! and posed a challenge against King Google.  Though they started small, they began to grow week by week.  Suddenly, the peasants are beginning journeys to Bing and this has started to cause problems.  What does King Bing want that’s so different from King Google?

This is the question on many an SEO or internet marketer’s mind lately.  It used to be okay to optimize pages for just Google in the past, but the rise of Bing has caused some to question the differences between the search engines to properly optimize for both.  Naturally, the algorithms are unknown and it is complicated by the fact that sometimes Bing lists just five results with other categories listed below.  The biggest difference seems to be that the focus for Bing is content and internal source data, Google’s is inbound links and the mystical page rank.

Since Bing is still in its early days, I expect a lot of tweaks to their system and hope for them, considering one of my clients found themselves listed second and third on Bing for their most relevant keyword, but the link listed second was dead!  This kind of mistake is surely not one that can lead to continued success for Bing.  Some marketers have talked about creating separate optimized pages for each, but I think this idea is ridiculous.  A good site is loaded with content and it just doesn’t make sense to recreate dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages to appeal to each search engine. However, being optimized for both could lend almost 100% of the domestic search market, making this idea tempting.  If the basic rules of SEO are followed – quality (relevant) content, crawlable sites, valid page rank through quality inbound links and references, and proper SEO-friendly site infrastructure, you should rank well on both in most cases.