Though the meta keyword tag is not used by the major search engines, a look at the Reality Check site shows that its writers are more worried about nabbing searchers who spell Barack Obama’s name wrong than getting folks who are curious about health reform to the site.  Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the staffers who threw the site together understand SEO – much less SEM – at all. They don’t even have ‘Barack Obama’ in text for the bots to find (the president’s name is only in a graphic and an alt tag).

Our SEO team’s recommendations?  Write a better title. Embed in the content common search terms like  “Obamacare,”  “health care coverage” and “health bill,” as the authors of the article suggest.  Deploy a suite of online analytical tools including AdWords, WordTracker, Google Analytics and others to identify additional popular search terms related to health reform. Create keyword-rich anchor text and cross-link to the various .gov sites.  If that sounds like too much work for our government friends, they could simply hire us to put Reality Check at the top of the search results.

Today, we ran the same search, for the term “Children’s Hospital,” on the Bing preview. Beyond the new wrapper and some elements positioned in different places, the results are subtly different.

In the first position on Bing (or are we supposed to spell it bing?) are the local listings, while they were in the second position before. A funny note: Initially, Bing (and Live, too, for that matter) keeps trying to position me in Little Rock, Arkansas, so it shows me local results for that area. I have to go in and change my location each time to get Kansas City results to appear. Guess I need to log-in and update my info for Microsoft! (We really, really don’t know why the search engines insist on pushing their local listings on us when there have so many flaws in the results. And getting them changed is a bear … a topic for an upcoming post.)

After local results, the second listing on Bing is for Children’s Hospital Boston, which was the first overall listing on Live. The rest of the results seem to follow in the same order, so it doesn’t appear as if there is a major algorithm change. Related Searches are now on the left (they were on the right before) but again look to be the same listings in the same order. There is also a handy Search History group below the related searches entries.

Here’s a nice feature. As you mouse over a snipped from a site, a line with a circle in it appears next to that listing (I’m sure this has a name). Mousing over that listing reveals an additional excerpt from the site, with site-link-type links as well. This gives you further knowledge on whether you want to click on the site or move on to the next listing.

We still don’t see any sponsored results for our search. Perhaps a better experience with the search engine will lead to more interest from advertisers. Until then, it may be a good opportunity for inexpensive traffic for advertisers.

The changes aren’t huge, and in our small test we don’t see a new algo, but we are pleasantly surprised with B(b)ing. Let’s hope we continue to see good things from the engine.