In simple terms, its goodbye to optimising your website for yahoo and the focus now is on Google and Bing. While Google still has the majority share (70%) of the search traffic, Bing’s share of the market is likely to increase with Yahoo’s search volumes.

As a webmaster or an seo, therefore, you need to have an seo strategy for Bing in place. A step in that direction is using Bing’s toolbox. The toolbox, in ways similar to Google’s webmaster tools, offers sitemap submission, url submission, malware detection, an seo toolkit and guidelines for webmasters. Using Bing’s toolbox, webmasters can get valuable insight into how Bing sees their sites and improvise as per its guidelines for webmasters.

Using Bing’s API, one can create dynamic 404 not found error pages. Which means that one can serve customised 404 pages, based on what the visitor was trying to access. And not just serve the standard, generic error page. From a user’s perspective, this makes a whole lot of sense. When customised cleverly, you can use it to give your user clear instructions on what to do when the page they are looking for is not found. Not leave them in the lurch groping around!

Bing’s toolbox also offers an “ads and campaigns tool” to create and manage ad campaigns.

Our seo strategy for our clients’ websites now also has a significant focus on Bing though admittedly, earlier it was heavily loaded in favor of Google. True the traffic that Bing can bring in pales in comparison to that a site can get through Google, it is nonetheless prudent to not ignore Bing.

A few points I found interesting in the post were:

- Do follow blog comments fall in the Black Hat-High Value quadrant. Black Hat!

- So is paid directory link building. What if these happen to be genuine industry directory listings I wonder?

- Viral content, expectedly is at the extreme end of the high-value side of the spectrum while Search engine submission is at the opposite end.

- Keyword research, on-page optimisation, xml-sitemaps, internal link architecture get a thumbs up both in terms of value and ethics.

Take a look at the seo tactics scatterplot here.

No longer, for example, can one ignore the fact that a presence on twitter today is essential to gauging the pulse of the market – what are people doing, what are people using, what do they want, what do they buy and ofcourse what do they say about your service, brand or company. No longer can one also ignore that social networking sites like You-tube and Facebook can be and are being increasingly leveraged as the new viral (read word-of-mouth) channels for promotion. It would be interesting to see how semantic tagging (Web 3.0) will impact our lives as users and as internet marketers.