After a partnership agreement was signed exactly one year ago, Yahoo! has finally started testing organic and paid listings from Microsoft Bing this week. Yahoo! states if all goes as planned, users should expect Yahoo!’s organic search results to be powered by Bing around August/September.

The organic search transition will happen automatically. However, if you perform SEO on your site and ranking high in these search engines is important to you, I recommend keeping a close eye on any updates and tips from both Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Yahoo has already provided its users with three valuable tips:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

I also found the Yahoo! FAQ page to be extremely helpful in answering some the questions I had.

Here’s to a smooth transition!