SEO for Bing, The Jury is Still Out

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.

Getting Your Site to the Top of Google –Real Time Update

To report on the progress of the experiment to demonstrate how to get your website for a given search term, in this instance “agents online” to show up within the first ten listings of Google, we have now achieved position number seventeen for the organic search. This has been about ten hours worth of work. If you are using these techniques to get a high ranking for your own real estate agent website just think of the number of prospective listings / buyers will end up landing on your website. In addition, you end up with a premium ranking and don’t need to make such a heavy investment in pay per click.

So just to recap the process, again,

1) Use google keywords tool to find a target keyword. High number of searches returning low page rank results. If you are targeting a specific service, REO’s, Short Sales, etc, you can get very targeted.

2) Register a URL using that search term. Our example for this experiment is AgentsOnline.org

3) Optimize your website or landing page to support that keyword and format the site for collection of your prospect’s contact information. For our example I created a thee page site feeding into the Listing and FSBO lead service from RedX.

4) Start getting backlinks to the URL that you have created. I add links from my blogs and created a couple of Squidoo lenses. I also comment often on the real estate blogs that I read and include the URL.

Just to summarize, that is the process. Pretty simple and if you do it three or four times, you can maximize your visibility on google which essentially automates the search engine optimization for your real estate website.