Trawling through my feeds yesterday, I stumbled on Rand Fishkins post which is probably one of the best summaries of the situation. And given Rands SEO interests, it covers off some very relevant information for search engine marketers.

I just want to highlight some of the key points he raised that will impact your SEO efforts the most:

1. SEO is now worth the Effort
As Rand points out, by combining the share of Bing and Yahoo!, they now represent a serious share of the search market. Its now worth the effort investing in ensuring your SEO is matched to Bings algorithm.

2. Farewell Yahoo! Link Data
Were not sure whats going to happen to Yahoo!s site explorer and advanced search queries, but they have been heavily relied by the SEOers for years. Itll be good if Bing integrates the information into their webmaster tools.

3. The Bing Webmaster Center " Join Now
Bing will now be an important part of your SEO strategy, so its important you sign up to the webmaster tools. Whilst their not quite as extensive as Googles just yet, the Bing team are working over time to improve them.

4. Local Could Move Beyond Google
Both MSN and Yahoo! had little penetration in the Local space independently, but together under the Bing umbrella, expect to see them increase their share. Bing has already made an obvious local play, and has the mapping technology to create a genuine local competitor.

5. Yahoo! Properties Could Lose Value
As the deal is squarely focused on Search, several of Yahoo!s other services could vanish or lose importance. From an SEO point of view, Im interested to see what happens with the Yahoo! Directory. Rand also highlights they unknown future of SearchMonkey and BOSS which he refers to as two of the best search apps out there.

5. Yahoo! Controls Their Own Search Experience
Whilst Bing will power Yahoo!s search results, Yahoo! still has ultimate control over how they are displayed and represented. This could still mean some on knowns for SEOers in terms of optimizing Yahoo! driven results.

6. Refocus on Yahoo! the Content Portal
By dropping search, Yahoo! is likely to reallocate energy and resources on its content and portal. Weve already seen the Yahoo! homepage overhaul. This is probably the first of many efforts in this front. And theyre not alone with Microsoft looking to overhaul MSN in terms of content and portal also.

So as you can see, the impact of the Yahoo! and Bing deal goes much deeper than just one powering search and the other selling advertising space.

I highly recommend you read Rands post, because it really is a good summary of the whole Yahoo! Bing story.

What will you do differently in terms of SEO and search advertising now that Bing and Yahoo! have joined forces. Share your plans via the comments section below.

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