Bing: Content, Social Media, User Experience and Link Building are all more important than SEO

The Bing Webmaster Blog did a short post about “5 Steps To Improving Search Rankings“. Eric Enge interviewed Duane Forrester that is the Sr. Product Manager
at Bing.

Here are the 5 steps to improve your search rankings in order of priority:

1. Content
2. Social
3. User Experience
4. Link Building
5. SEO

This is how Bing treats social media which I believe that Google is not yet taking into account as far as ranking is concerned:

“In terms of the integration of social into the search results pages, Bing has a very rich and deep experience. We bring in Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and more.”

Here this is what Duane Forrester thinks of link building:
“Link building is important, but not for the reasons that SEOs want it to be important. Links are still a vote of confidence. They’re still valuable. The age-old caveats apply. You want organically grown links. You want relevant links. You want links that are, in some way, related to what you’re talking about from sites that matter. From trusted sources as well. The days of, “I have to get an .edu. I have to get a .gov,” those are way behind us. People that are playing that game now, they’re far behind the curve. They need to catch up with the reality of link building. One area that link building does prove valuable in, and it has always been this way since the first link was placed on the Internet, is for driving direct traffic. That is not ever going to change.”

The full interview can be seen of Eric Enge’s Stone Temple blog.