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.