Search Engine Optimization for MSN Search

Posted By Darren Rowse 8th of March 2005 Search Engine Optimization

One of the nice surprises that we’ve had over at the Breaking News Blog collective over the past few months has been the way that MSN Search has ranked our blogs highly. Even though the blogs are new and are yet to have the many links that their competitors have pointing at them – we have been on the receiving end of some pretty decent traffic from this new search engine.

A number of times I’ve asked why this is so – I’m not sure how long it will last but we’re making the most of it while it does and doing our best to optimize the blogs for MSN and the other Search Engines.

Search Engine Journal has a helpful article on Search Engine Optimization for MSN Search which might give some hints as to why we’ve been so highly ranked on MSN Search. here are a few of the key points that they make that might help you optimize your blog for MSN search – a growing force in the Search Engine wars.

– ‘MSN readily admits that MSNbot will actively be using Meta tags for part of its web site analysis.’

– ‘Similar to other search engines, the ‘title tag’ again appears to be the most heavily weighted within the algorithm, followed closely by the Meta Description Tag’

– ‘The Bot does not read text within a graphic’ (rather it likes simple and plain text best)

– MSN Search calls for pages to be under 150K in size

– Words (even keywords) within headers, footers and tables will not be read. Again, simple text is the rule of thumb.

– Linking, as per usual, will be an important part of MSNBot’s equation. (particularly internal links from the main page are powerful. They suggest that every page on your site should be accessible from your front page by three clicks only).

If you want more information on SEO for MSN search you might want to look over the MSN Search section for Site Owners.

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