Optimizing for MSN

The Advent of MSN as a Search Engine

Microsoft had been napping for a long time and ignored the advancements in the field of Search Engine and Content Targeted Advertising. Although now dependent on Yahoo's Intokmi for their search results, Microsoft has made it very clear that they will compete with Yahoo and Google for their share in the Search Engine market. Given Microsoft's aggressive nature in fighting competition, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate them.

The recently re-launched MSN Search and future MSN Search integration with upcoming versions of Windows is about to make MSN one of the biggest and most important players in the world of searching. Thus, it is imperative to get good ranking in MSN if you want the share of traffic they can give to your Web page. Although MSN search spider does a fairly good job in crawling Web pages, you may benefit by submitting your website at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx .

Optimizing for MSN Search

With Microsoft sharing Yahoo's Inktomi search index to provide their search results, optimizing for yahoo meant optimizing for MSN. But things are changing at a rapid phase and with Microsoft getting active on the patent front, it is evident that they are working on their own search algorithm.

Luckily for us, the rules of Web page optimization that thought to be followed to please the MSN search algorithm aren't very different when compared to those already followed for other search Engines.

What They Lay Emphasis On?

As with most other Search Engines, MSN Search places heavy emphasis on content. They even allow higher keyword density than Google does. For MSN Search, it is best to keep your pages at least 200 words long and have phrases which searchers commonly use. Other than that, they lay importance in the following in the order they are listed.

• As MSN team declares in their blog that, they attach a lot of importance to the number and quality of sites that link to your pages.

• Clean coding is necessary with MSN Search. They even go to the extent of asking Webmasters to ensure that their pages are HTML validated. MSN's spider has a strong preference for well-written code. If a Website's coding is poorly written, it appears that MSN Search downgrades the site's search rankings heavily.

• A well-designed site map with good link text will help the MSN spider to crawl the site and ensure that all pages are indexed.

• Title tag should be less than 80 characters long and should be attractive enough to make a searcher click on the link.

• MSN Search doesn't rank based on Meta Keywords and Description, but it seems to place some importance on meta tags. So adding appropriate meta tags for each page might be beneficial as well.

• MSN Search recommends that an HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB. Therefore, ensure that you limit the size of your Web pages to a reasonable limit.

What MSN Doesn't Like?

MSN search lists the following as being search engine unfriendly due to the difficulty search engine robots have with this type of content:
• Frames
• Flash
• JavaScript navigation
• HTML Image Maps
• Dynamic URL's

Techniques not liked by MSN Search

MSN thinks the following to be unscrupulous SEO practices:
• Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page's keyword density, this includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view.
• Using hidden text or links. You should use only text and links that are visible to users.
• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms.

As you can see, these "rules" are no different from those mentioned by the rest of the industry. So avoid the above-mentioned techniques and the chances of your getting banned by any search engine are remote. On a related note, this is what MSN search's Program Manager, Eytan Seidman, has to say about spamming MSN.

"You crawled my site, so why can't I find it in your search index? This is one is a little bit easier. The reason that this is most likely happening is that we are detecting the page as spam when we analyze the page to build our index. How can you make sure that this does not happen? The best thing to do is to not spam us. On our site owners help, we talk about some of the things that we consider spam. In case you have not read it, here is a quick refresher: dirty javascript redirects, stuffing alt text, white on white links, off topic links etc. We take this stuff very seriously and we are continuously working to improve our spam detection."

Conclusion

With the increasing popularity of MSN Search and with Microsoft planning to make the search a part of their next windows release, your efforts to optimize your site for MSN are sure to pay off. For more details on optimization for MSN Search, read their help document and blog.

Hotel Internert Marketing by Gatesix