same here, we rank very high in a series of searches in google but are no-where to be seen on Bing. Do they know we are a mac based business and specifically exclude us

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I would say the very first thing, which a lot of developers seem to get wrong (and I don’t blame them, because it’s not easy) is building a site with clean, valid code.

When your home page is put through the W3 validator, you get ~200 errors:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fanthillonline.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Obviously Bing being less refined than Google might find it harder to read code that isn’t valid, so it would be interesting to see how you go if you made sure you site was producing valid code..

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James Tuckerman Reply:
September 7th, 2009 at 5:32 pm

Thanks Ryan. Helpful stuff.

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Ant Eater Reply:
September 8th, 2009 at 8:50 am

SEO advice from someone who offers SEO services. You’d think they’d at least follow their own advice. The SEO sales page on the Antevo site doesn’t validate…now isn’t that something.

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Ryan - Antevo Pty Ltd Reply:
September 8th, 2009 at 9:35 am

Thanks for picking that up. We recently relaunched our own website and we are still tweaking content.. optimisation comes after content is completed in our process, so we will have this fixed soon. Keep in mind I’m not saying this is the be all and end all, but I do believe invalid code doesn’t help even though some people may think it is a “misconception”.

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Lucio Ribeiro Reply:
September 8th, 2009 at 9:49 am

Ryan, don’t think you should be justifying yourself, but let me pick on one of you point I dont’ agree, under my view content comes along with optimisation they walk hand-to-hand.
I think your website is pretty much well done.
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.antevo.com.au%2F

Ryan - Antevo Pty Ltd Reply:
September 8th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

Lucio you are right, I should not be justifying myself. Since discovering the few issues that existed on our site we have fixed them (except for a Google Maps issue, which we are still working on). I appreciate the fact that “Ant Eater” took the time to look at our website, check it and provide the feedback – thank you. We admit that we are not perfect (is anyone?) but we will always do 100% our best to respond to any issues that we come across.

There is a really common misconception that invalid markup directly impacts SEO. Sure, things like having alt tags on images is really important (and do have an impact on SEO and valid code).

…but everything else is really meaningless.

For instance, Google’s homepage has 39 errors (and consider how simple it is):

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Bing.com has 12 errors:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

To assume that these sites have trouble crawling code because it doesn’t validate would make no sense if they themselves are unable to validate.

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Lucio Ribeiro Reply:
September 8th, 2009 at 9:11 am

Spot on

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James,
around all my clients and personal websites BING represents something between 3 to 10% of traffic, nothing more than this.
I’d say you are not out of the average.
Even though Explorer/bing are standard on most computers webusers behaviour is different.
For instance one of most searched terms in Bing is Google, that is self explanatory.
Bing is relying heavily in increase their market share after their deal with Yahoo.
Some of the information around Optimising for BING are speculative, while others are direct and actionable.
There are some things you can make to help to increase your SERPS and CT on Bing.
If you don’t have an account with Bing Webmaster Tools, now is the time.
you can create an account on http://tinyurl.com/q78hb7.
Submit a Sitemap, and start watching for what Bings is indexing and presenting you for.

The best way to attract people to your website, and keep them coming back, is to fill your webpages with valuable content in which your target audience is interested, and Anthill does is spectacularly.

The following guidelines can help you create a more effective and popular webpage with Bing:

(pay special attention to Meta Title and Meta Descriptions, It seems that Bing relies hard on it).

* In the visible webpage text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your website.
* Limit all webpages to a reasonable size. Bing recommends covering one topic per webpage. An HTML webpage with no images should be under 150 KB.
* Make sure that each webpage is accessible by at least one static text link.
* Don’t put the text that you want indexed within images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it isn’t displayed only inside an image of your company logo.
* Add a Sitemap, which helps MSNBot to find all of your webpages. Links that are embedded in menus, list boxes, and similar elements aren’t accessible to web crawlers unless they appear in your Sitemap. For information on creating Sitemaps, see the Help topic for the Webmaster Center’s Sitemaps tool.
* Keep your website hierarchy fairly flat. That is, each webpage should only be from one to three clicks away from the default webpage.

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‘Anthill Online’ showed your site as ranked #1 for me!

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Lucio Ribeiro Reply:
September 8th, 2009 at 9:18 am

It’s expected (at least) to be ranked nr one for branded keywords, the question is how about non-branded top conversion keywords?

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Hi James,

Having recently blogged about the same SEO issue with my site “I’m thinking of a four letter word and its not Bing”, I asked a few search experts what is going on.

Turns out the Bing algorithms havent really been turned on for Australia yet. Bing are focusing their efforts on the bigger markets first, hence why we havent seen any TV advertising in Australia but they are saturating the US with it.

For a bit of fun check out Black Dog to compare Google vs. Bing in a split screen http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/search-com.php

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Hi James, I have wondered this too, although not too concerned at this stage because Google has over 90% share of Oz searches. After reading your post I did a search for Anthill online too on Bing (world search) and saw Anthill Online come up as the first listing, however under the sites from Australia tab the garbage you mention was there. I have had some wildly different results from bing across the three hybrids of Bing that I use and I wonder if it has anything to do with bing.com. and bing.com.au which has search the web and Search Australia). Its possible there are slightly different algorithms for all three, and I also wonder what relevance my IP address has on the Bing search in each instance. I haven’t had enough time to fiddle with Bing yet as there are more pressing things so it would be great to hear back from others.

Resources for SEO that I always use are http://www.seomoz.org/ and http://www.davechaffey.com, I am sure there will be some commentary on bing on these sites.

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Hi James,

The link you’ve included is searching Australian sites only.

If you search worldwide you’ll see that you rank #1 … http://www.bing.com/search?q=anthill+online&go=&form=QBREqs=n

Your site is a .com address which is probably why you are not ranking under Australian sites. Also, where are you hosted as I think that also plays a factor?

For others who are not ranking well in Bing, there are some SEO guidelines for Bing on the Webmaster community that are worth checking out ..

http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/09/03/search-engine-optimization-for-bing.aspx

Alexei

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I agree totally with Alexei and Mark F. Especially if you site is hosted on a US server, without a .com.au url you would not get any favour searching on Australia only. I’m in Australia and you come up #1 on global search for that term.

Also your title tag does not actually mention “anthill online” as such.

I’ve got a #1 ranking for a key term for one of my sites ( http://www.bing.com/search?q=white+card+online&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n ) and the things I have noticed are:

1. Both Bing and Yahoo seem to give more weight to keywords being in the domain (Think both TLD and maybe subdomain?)
2. They both seem to have less emphasis on backlinks?
3. Generally Bing and Yahoo place more emphasis on on-page optimisation. Certainly the title tag is essential, as has already been said.

For my WhiteCard site in Analytics for non-paid searches I get the ratios as follows:

Google: 100
Bing: 50
Yahoo: 50

(site is ranked #1 in all 3 SE’s for “white card online”)

But, I do run Bing and Yahoo PPC, and I think Analytics does not distinguish between paid and non-paid for Bing or Y! which is frustrating. (Does anyone know why, or a fix on this?).

Cheers

Peter

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Though there are some differences between the algorithm of Google and Bing, the concept, I think, is just the same. And as I always say, target Google and you target all search engines. LOL!

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Our standard line to all our Australian clients goes something like this;
“it's nice to display well on Bing and Yahoo but if you don't rank on Google then don't bother getting out of bed in the morning”.
In my opinion Bing & Yahoo are putting 99.9% of their resources into the US search market instead of worrying out us “good-ol-boys” down under with a population smaller than California.

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Where is your site hosted? It needs to be geo-targeted to Australia either via Bing Toolkit or through a host servers Aussie IP. You don't have a country TLD to indicate its Australia. Maybe that's the problem.

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What a great blog !!! thanks for sharing ..

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