MSN, which has 6.6% of the search market is currently found at www.live.com. MSN's ranking algorithm has its own nuances which will be noted in this video but in many cases, the rules of optimization may be the same as Yahoo's.
Website optimization:
Fresh content is king
If your site is in a competitive marketplace and you are finding it difficult to get a leg up on your competitors in MSN, then write original content in order to build up your site and reputation. MSN appears to elevate websites that regularly update their content and a blog is a great way to post this content for others to read and favor you with links.
Themed structure
Construct your website using a themed structure where core site topics or themes have their own unique section of the website to themselves. When the search engine spiders index the content within the section, they will be given absolute clarity as to what the section is about.
Navigation
Pages with text navigation which lends itself to simpler and more relevant indexing are performing well.
Website submission:
Unlike Google and Yahoo, MSN does not have a fully operational Webmaster Central for webmasters to submit sitemaps and to acquire insight into their website profile on MSN. Fortunately, there are two known ways to get your sitemap submitted to MSN:
1. The best method for submitting your sitemap is by adding a sitemap reference in your Robots.txt file using the following format:
Sitemap: http://www.xyzname.com/sitemap.xml
2. A back-door strategy can be used to submit your sitemap to MSN through the news aggregation service called Moreover. To submit your sitemap, substitute the bolded text with your own information in the following URL:
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.xyzname.com/sitemap.xml
Link building:
MSN places a great deal of weight on incoming links and does not appear to apply as many filters to the links that Google and Yahoo do. As a result, ethical or not, many link building strategies such as reciprocal linking and paid links appear to pay dividends.
It is also noteworthy that MSN's spider is very active so any incoming links that you receive will often be spidered within a week. Furthermore, MSN's link filtering systems are not as bogged down as the other search engines, so incoming links appear to affect rankings much faster which tends to help when tweaking a campaign and measuring the value of links.
As you can see there is little to report on the intricacies of optimizing for MSN because, quite frankly, MSN is fairly predictable and by the book; write good original content, optimize it well using SEO techniques and ensure to submit your sitemap to MSN. If you combine those elements with a solid link building campaign, then you are sure to move into the rankings where you can continue to tweak your optimization until you reach the top.
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