Weeks after Microsoft’s search engine changed its name to Bing, both Microsoft and number two search engine Yahoo decided to form a partnership. The deal, a ten-year agreement between both search engines, essentially involves the search engine algorithm of Bing combined with the advertising of Yahoo to create a search engine prominent enough to make a dent in Google’s current dominance. According to an article published in the New York Times, the partnership will allow, as of now, a 28-percent hold in search engine traffic, although Google still has a two-thirds hold. For details, SiteProNews has more specifics on the partnership between the search engines.

What, exactly, will this mean for the future of using search engines and search engine traffic? According to the piece published in the New York Times, the main motivation of Microsoft to work with Yahoo is advertising as, although MSN had been the number three search engine for years, many companies didn’t want to advertise on MSN, as their ads on MSN brought in too little traffic. By pairing with Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing will have more visibility and a larger percentage of search engine traffic and, as many companies do use Yahoo for advertising, Microsoft will see an increase in revenue from searches in this partnership. What’s in it for Yahoo? A better search engine experience, as the algorithm behind Bing, which includes data about users’ search habits to influence a search and topic-specific search engine results, will result in more thorough results broken down by topics for the user to find exactly what he or she needs.

And, how will this influence SEO? At the moment, most SEO companies focus their optimization on getting higher ranks for a website in Google, although Yahoo is a second choice. Perhaps, with the Yahoo-Bing partnership, the influence of Yahoo, outside of shopping searches, will be greater, as now the search engine will have a larger percentage of traffic. Although the combined traffic of Yahoo and Bing is only 28 percent at the moment, the difference between Google and Yahoo-Bing may grow smaller over time and optimization work on a website would need to become geared toward top ranks on both of these search engines.