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Optimizing SEO Beyond Google

Optimizing SEO

In search, Google is king, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the other search engines out there. According to Search Engine Land, one in five searches now take place through Bing—not a small percentage. Other search platforms are also growing (i.e. Duck Duck Go, based right here on the Main Line), and old warhorse Yahoo holds on to a significant amount of Internet searches.

So how is SEO optimization different with some of these other search engines? The markITwrite blog offers some good advice, with a few key points expanded on here.

Bing and Yahoo: Go Meta  

While they are no longer considered by Google, meta keywords (which describe the theme of an individual Web page) still matter in Bing and Yahoo. Plus, Bing and Yahoo do more than Google to index rich media content such as Flash and Silverlight, so pay attention to directory and file names when utilizing these applications (you still want to put any text you wish to be crawled outside of such media).

Bing helps Facebook return search queries, so that’s a good reason to pay Microsoft’s search engine some attention. You might weigh keywords a bit differently to return particular Bing/Facebook results, for instance.

Duck Duck Go Loves FAQs

FAQ pages can help return results for specific search queries. This can be especially helpful with Duck Duck Go, which tries to directly answer such queries on its results page.

When you type “How can I become a member of Historic Odessa?“ into Duck Duck Go, 4x3 client Historic Odessa’s FAQ page comes up second from the top. While returning multiple pages from the Historic Odessa website, the same question in Google does not (for us) bring up the FAQ page anywhere on the first page of results.

This is a good example of why different search engine algorithms matter.

SEO Optimization

For the most part the advice for search engine optimization is similar no matter which service is used—mobile responsive sites, a link-building strategy, quality content, local keywords, alt tags. Good SEO is good SEO, after all.