For years, the mantra of SEO has been “Google, Google Google,” with little to no mind paid to the other search engines.  Now, with Microsoft’s Bing controlling approximately one quarter of the search market, that’s no longer the case – and publishers who ignore Bing are missing out on huge traffic and revenue opportunities.

Among the stable of publishers who run Chitika, a staggering 47% are receiving less traffic from Bing and Yahoo than they should be.  With a network-wide average of 23.58% of all search traffic coming from a Bing-powered search engine, that’s a lot of missed opportunity, opportunity now coming from a single source.  On average, publishers who don’t optimize for Bing are missing out on a 9.4% bump in traffic.

“By combining forces, Bing and Yahoo have made it not only possible, but necessary to optimize for a powerful number 2 search engine,” says Chitika CTO Alden DoRosario.  “Our publishers are very smart, but so many of them need to put some hard work into making sure Bing loves them as much as Google does.”

For example, one publisher who specializes in local content gets only 1.8% of their traffic from Bing and Yahoo combined.  Simply by opening up their site to allow non-Google search engines to index all pages should result in an almost immediate 21% bump in traffic, with an even higher bump in revenues (both Yahoo and Bing tend to drive traffic that is significantly more likely to click on ads).