Article by Barry Schwarts via Search Engine Land

Searchmetrics has released their SEO ranking factors for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, today. Similar to their Google ranking factors, Searchmetrics analyzed 10,000 popular keywords and 300,000 websites appearing in the top 30 search results and looked at how various factors correlated with rankings.

The top five key findings were:

(1) Top brands rank higher on Bing, as they do in Google.

(2) Backlink numbers are closely linked to higher rankings on Bing

(3) Social signals closely linked to higher rankings

(4) Quality content is important for search rankings

(5) On page technical factors are a must have

Here is a chart showing the Bing ranking factors by importance:

The interesting part also is that when Searchmetrics compared the first page of search results on Bing and Google, they showed that 24.7% of the URLs listed were the same and 37.3% of the domains were the same. This clearly shows there is a difference in the results between Google and Bing.