Will Bing Radically Change SEO?

Microsoft is set to launch Bing tomorrow. Touted as “potential Google killer” by some media, Bing has received a mix of reviews (CNet, Wired).

But will it change the SEO landscape?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be defined as designed from two different and diametrically opposed perspectives:

1. To augment the relevance of context, to deliver the idea of a page’s actual topic.
2. To simply increase the chance a conversion (and revenue) can happen.

The first perspective concentrates on reinforcing the page’s content and context, including restating the topics/keywords on crucial parts of the page (SEO) and building a contextual online presence (link building). This SEO paradigm concentrates on building high quality traffic relevant to the contents, and is truly concerned about bounce rates.

On the other hand, the second perspective concentrates on trying to gather as much traffic as possible, often by utilising SEO to target tangential topics with the vision that topic relevance/overlap may lead/sway the audience to conversions. Such practices may at times be considered as gray or even black hat.

All search engines are basically built with the sole purpose of translating webpages into topics as their kernels. To do this, despite the varying methods, the fundamental principles are the same: observe the keywords which appear to be unique and relate them to the context in which they appear.

From these, I really doubt that anything would radically change from white-hat SEO perspective. Admitedly there may be minor variations and tips, but if we always concentrate on reinforcing the topics of a page then truly what works for Google and Yahoo would most definitely work for Bing. Should Bing choose to be radically different in assessing the pages’ contents, it would actually run the risk of presenting doubtful search results since we know that Google has got most of it right despite its occasional shortcomings.

Gray and black hat SEO practices, on the other hand…hmm, reminds me of when we found out that Google no longer cared about Meta Keywords.