SEO For MSN/Live Search
August 23rd, 2008 by Nick
One of the primary goals for most SEOs is to rank highly in the Google search engine results. While this might seem largely short sighted, the fact is that Google is by far the most popular search engine of them all and accounts for a majority of all searches conducted on the Internet. However, although Live Search (formerly MSN Search) is third in the league table of English language search engines it can still account for a good number of targeted visitors and certainly shouldn’t be overlooked completely when undertaking an SEO campaign.
Spammy Results Abound?
All the search engines operate differently and while Google and Yahoo are seen largely to have eliminated spammy results from their indexes, a lot of users believe MSN to be trailing behind in this respect. That shouldn’t be used as an excuse to employ black hat techniques, but it does provide us with clearer evidence of the kind of white hat practice that will help a page rank well in MSN Live Search.
Link Popularity And Poprank
Plans are afoot to improve the Poprank (MSNs measure of the value of your site’s popularity) formula but they are currently less discerning over the quality of links that point to your site. Reciprocal links, links from unpopular sites, and masses of links collected at once can help push pages to the top of the MSN ranking but they will do little to assist in Google or Yahoo.
Keywords In Domain Names
Keyword rich domain names and URLs also prove popular; again, a tactic that is often employed by the less ethical websites (although that doesn’t necessarily mean that a good URL using a relevant keyword is a bad thing). The same is also true of sites that employ their keywords in Meta and HTML tags.
Keyword Density And Word Count
Live Search seems to prefer pages with a low keyword density and will happily push sites with very little on page content. The combination of this and the less evolved link ranking algorithm that helps seemingly spammy blog pages still rise to the top of the pack in the MSN Live Search results. However, things are changing, and as the algorithms update they will become more and more likely to discern the good, relevant, popular pages from their less beneficial counterparts.
Less Advanced Algorithms
The MSN search algorithms are clearly not as advanced as those belonging to Yahoo and Google, but they are making reasonable advances. Fewer pages with poor quality content and bad link profiles are hitting the very top spots and MSN, like the other search engines, are attempting to offer their visitors more relevant search results. Topical relevance is becoming more important and it’s likely that longer pages that include semantically related keywords will begin to fare better.
Optimising For MSN Live Search
According to recent figures, Microsoft Search sites accounted for only 3.4% of all UK based searches in the month of June. However, MSN can provide a site with traffic quicker than both Yahoo and Google, and while their was only a small increase in their market share, they have gained reasonable ground on Yahoo.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS feed.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.
I agree with all of your points and I think that msn is good but not as advanced as Google and Yahoo. Sometimes I enter into the same search term into MSN and Google but when msn delivers the results I could not locate the site.
I am very much impressed with msn because I think msn fulfills the needs of mind in the sense. Of mind msn is very easy to use. When you have entered into it, the text msn shows all the results in a very simple way but I accept this thing that msn has 3rd position in the search world.
That’s great but I think sometimes and some ways that msn is best for Google and equivalent to Yahoo because Google is only a search engine but msn have lots of channels and also has a multi-messenger utility. It is called polygamy. MSN Polygamy allows you to run multiple instances of MSN messenger.
I agree from your keyword density view point and I think it’s a well-known fact in the world of Search Engine Optimization. Keyword density plays the greatest role in the ranking of your site’s pages. Keyword density is the percentage of total keyword to the total content of the article in relation to each such keyword.
I have a suggestion for MSN. MSN don’t have the map like Google earth and Google map. So I think msn should add the map, earth and blog facility in his search bar and this would be very beneficial for msn.
I have a suggestion for MSN. MSN don’t have the map like Google earth and Google map. So I think msn should add the map, earth and blog facility in his search bar and this would be very beneficial for msn.
I am very much impressed with msn because I think msn fulfills the needs of mind in the sense. Of mind msn is very easy to use. When you have entered into it, the text msn shows all the results in a very simple way but I accept this thing that msn has 3rd position in the search world.
I agree with all of your points and I think that msn is good but not as advanced as Google and Yahoo. Sometimes I enter into the same search term into MSN and Google but when msn delivers the results I could not locate the site.
I agree with all of your points and I think that msn is good but not as advanced as Google and Yahoo. Sometimes I enter into the same search term into MSN and Google but when msn delivers the results I could not locate the site.
I think MSN has to make an effort to catch up with Google and Yahoo, for far too long its taken a back seat amongst the search engines but can still provide useful search results.