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According to Compete (which tracks U.S. visitors only) Bing had 49.57 Million unique visitors for June 2009. That makes it the 13th largest website in terms of unique visitors in the U.S. for June. Larger than Digg’s 39 Million uniques and Twitter’s 23 Million for June. Just goes to show you a $100 Million Dollar advertising campaign can buy you some traction. It was beaten by it’s own big brother MSN Live (people still use their Hotmail accounts I suppose) but still the growth has been impressive to date. It will be interesting to see if this growth can continue.

Also it’s interesting to note that overall search volume was down across the board by 1.7% in June (Google lost .09% search queries). The tag team tandem of Bing/Live increased it’s search queries by 19 million. The only major search engine to do so. Incorporating Bing and Live as a PPC Tandem is something were going to be compelled to test. No doubt other Internet Marketers  will be doing the same.

Here’s Bing’s own comment on “Bing at month one” published by Bing today. – the June growth as well as additional information that can prove valuable. If your looking to drive traffic with Bing I recommend a trip to the Bing Toolbox. From the Bing Toolbox website.

“The Bing Toolbox” is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing™ community. It’s a one-stop portal to all of the services you need to drive traffic and increase engagement with your site and applications”

Bing Toolbox Website

Optimizing Your Website for Bing

Bing’s Marketing Slug when it was launched gives us a clue. “A Decision Engine not Search Engine” It really is a search engine despite it’s cute marketing angle, however it’s all about how Bing displays the result it’s algorithm says will have a certain level of relevancy as it relates to your “intent” when you enter the search query into it’s engine. Ultimately all search engines take an educated guess as to the intention behind your search query.

Modern search engines have a huge degree of data on “you” (the universal you) that’s giving them clues as to what best matches your intent and ranks results accordingly. They’ve followed you around your various travels on this thing we call the “internet” and they extrapolate “guess” accordingly.

Many of the methodologies search engines use within their “algorithms” are the result of what current sciences know to be true about such things as Networks, (like the small degree of separation between each of us {Think Kevin Bacon} not networking as in computers, although there are amazing similarities) Game Theory, Probability, Boolean Operations and various other data mining techniques.

Call it the Math of human knowledge if you will, we can simplify it as a math formula that takes a problem (the intent behind your query) as input and outputs a solution to the problem. The problem is and always has been to define the “original intent”. ” The Relevancy of output versus the original intent behind the input. So search engines fudge their results with the hope they’ve returned enough options to make you happy with the result and you will in turn continue to use their service. Ultimately the end user has the final say about what constitutes “original intent” .

In many ways we as marketers share the same problem faced by search engines. If we know the “original intent” of our chosen target market we can optimize our product and services and hence our profits and revenue. Often times we leave that work to the search engines and engage the aid of search engines to deliver to us the “market” we’ve predisposed had an “intention” towards our offerings. It’s no wonder we become obsessed with any undo change in how these “Search Engines” operate. Many of us attempt to “game the ” SERPS” (Search Engine Results Page) forgetting ultimately it’s the “Original Intent” that matters.

The search engines change in response to “Original Intent” and the greatest change taking place currently and what’s being lost by many IM’ers is people want more than the 10 Blue Links on Google’s SERP. They’re looking for video, images, podcasts, local information, related social media sites, relevant networks and other multi media forms. The Search Engines have responded accordingly i.e. Google’s “Universal Search” Ask’s recent redesign, Microsoft’s Bing, the launch of Wolfram-Alpha and RAIS. How we choose to view the “output” has morphed rapidly.

As a marketer when I’m asked; How should we optimize? my answer is Completely! Optimize everything, your text (you are sprinkling in “relevant keywords”?) optimize your images (use keywords in the alt tag) and Caption any on-page photo using the <strong> tag. Use SEO friendly tags for your video %$?demo1vid?/ is not search engine friendly. Please Universal Search isn’t going away.

Bing in particular uses a ton of 3rd party resources (content) when it displays “answers” These are things like review sites, shopping sites, blog posts and the like. These are your competitors so you should be getting 3rd party content on your site as well. Embed a well tagged video, write product reviews, do demo’s, organize and plan a well tagged image gallery.

These are things that people jump to from the 1st position to other search entries. One last hint, if you do a Product Search on Bing for HD Television you’ll find a ton of Bing CashBack Partners. Become one yourself!

All The Best

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Tags: Ask, Bing, Google, Live Search, SEO, Universal search