Surprisingly, Microsoft has been a relative late comer to the self-generated search party. Though originally launching Bing Search in 1998, they didn’t get serious about search until after Google had established and proven the business search model.

It wasn’t until January 2005 that they formally switched to their own in-house technology from Yahoo!, having up until then relied on partners like Overture, Looksmart, and Inktomi to power their search service. Microsoft finally dumped Yahoo!’s search ad program in May of 2006.

Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search and Bing Search) is the current iteration of Microsoft’s web search engine, and lies fourth in the list of most used search engines after Google, Baidu, and Yahoo!. If you only include English language search engines, then the fact that Baidu largely operates in Chinese elevates Bing Live to third in the list, with Ask fourth.

Using search tabs that include web, news, images, music, desktop, local and Microsoft Encarta, Live Search gives users the opportunity to identify a wide range of specific information.

Live Search is accessible through Microsoft’s Live.com and Bing.com web portal and includes some innovative features, such as the ability to control the amount of search result information displayed, for example just the title, a short summary or a longer summary. You can also opt to view additional search results on the same web, instead of clicking through results pages. Users are also able to save searches and have them automatically updated on Live.com.

Live Search mobile enables web search from any phone with Internet access, allowing users to find the latest news items, search images and photos, get instant answers for weather, stocks, maps, even product search.

Though Google and Yahoo! are far more popular than the Microsoft product, it still deserves close attention. Set as the default Internet Explorer search engine, Bing Search services over 2.5 billion worldwide queries each month. Their mission statement is to be “more useful by providing consumers with improved access to information and more precise answers to their questions.”

ComScore report that Bing searchers are in fact 48% more likely to purchase a product or service online than the average Internet user, less clearly equating to more when it comes to e-sales.

Like all of the major search engines, Bing builds their index of sites using bots to crawl the web to discover new and updated information. Microsoft spiders don’t currently index Flash, although this is an area that they are believed to be looking closely at. This information is processed by the Bing servers using secret, complex and Bing-specific algorithms to determine relevant returns. At SEO Company, a team of SEO professionals use their experience of and insight into the Microsoft algorithms to deliver our dentists consistently high search rankings.

We identify themes, differences and similarities that we focus on to get a head start for our dentists. Algorithms, while possessing similarities, also reveal unique SEO opportunities. An interesting feature of Live Search is that Bing does not apply the same types of aging criteria as Google and Yahoo!. When content is added or updated, spiders re-index the site rapidly. Bing tends to pick up and credit new content and inbound links very quickly, meaning that with well-deployed tactics a website can be ranked in a short amount of time.

As is the case with all the major search engines, the most important aspect of effective SEO is fantastic content – keyword-rich and ripe for high quality, organic link building. Theme and topic relevance is critical. A well-defined web site, with on-subject topics will without doubt rank higher than an ‘all things to all people’ effort. Bing Search loves a strong and themed structure, good relevant content, and quality inbound links featuring keyword-rich link anchor text. Deep links from external websites should be from authoritative, theme-relevant sites, since Bing is working with context weighted calculation. Strong conceptual input and application from the beginning delivers long-term rewards.

Bing is sensitive though (much more sensitive than most) to high keyword density. Traditionally, keyword percentage has fallen somewhere around 3.5 to 4% for Bing. Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page’s keyword density, including stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view, can kill your SEO stone dead. Using hidden text or links and techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page such as using link farms can also prove terminal.

Clean, well-written code is a must with Bing Search, as its spider has a strong preference for high quality and valid code. Poorly written or non-valid coding will lead to Bing Search downgrading the site’s search rankings.

Bing places more importance on meta tags than Google and Yahoo!. So TITLE and DESCRIPTION should be there, relevant and keyword-rich, no matter what. Titles are the single most important piece of code on your entire web page, holding great weight in the algorithm and providing a précised window on page content, enticing visitors to click through on your return.

The heading tags prioritise your page information and are given a significant amount of weight in the algorithm, provided that they are not abused.

A clean navigation structure is preferable, with each page accessible by at least one static text link. Internal site links are highly regarded by Bing, allowing the spiders easy access to the whole of your site and in the process feeding them with relevant textual information. Be sure to link extensively within the site, using considered anchor text thematically related to the content of the recipient pages.

There is some evidence that Bing’s spider does not dive as deeply as the Google spider, so it is best to keep the site hierarchy relatively flat. Ideally, each page should only be one to three clicks away from the home page. Site maps enable the BingBot to find all of your pages easily. Links embedded in menus, list boxes and other similar elements are invisible to web crawlers unless they appear in your site map.