Optimizing Tips for MSN

[Webnauts]

Here you can find very useful tips for optimizing your web site for MSN.

1. With don't use your keywords more than 1 time in the description tag.

2. Try for an overall keyword wt. of the visible body text of less than 6%. Try to achieve minimum 3% where possible.

3. Don't use irrelevant META tags. Test them here.

4. Keywords in the domain name.

If possible, try to get a domain name which contain your keyword phrase. Or, it should contain your keyword phrase, and the keywords should be separated by hyphens (best option) or underscores.

To make sure that the engines recognize the keyword phrase, try to purchase domain names that separate each keyword with a hyphen (preferable) or an underscore. Most of the engines place added relevancy on keywords found in the domain name.

5. Consider naming this page after your keyword phrase.

Most of the engines place added relevancy on keywords found in the name of the page, or the URL. When naming your pages, try to name your pages after your keyword phrases.

6. Add your keyword phrase to a style attribute.

7. Consider naming your graphics with your keyword phrase and gaining a boost in relevancy that way.

8. MSN gives ranking honors to sites with an abundance of incoming links. And the good news is that MSN is counting a greater number of your incoming links toward ranking with the nit picking that Google and Yahoo! do. And that if those links have your keywords in them as anchor text, they help ranking for those keywords. You want to make sure that the page of the Website linking to you is in the MSN index and that it has a strong number of incoming to that domain as well as having less than 80 links on the page linking to you.

9. One Topic per page is recommended.

MSN Quote: "The best way to attract people to your site, and keep them coming back, is to design your pages with valuable content that your target audience is interested in.

In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.

Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page.

An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB," but lets not forget Google that would appreciate under 100KB

It's important that the sites linking to you are in the same Topic or "theme" area as your site. It doesn't have to be a product or service that is exactly the same as yours, a competitor.

For example if you sell web design, you can have anything related to web design services or serves other than actual web design. Of you can have news articles about web design that link to you.

If you are a Realtor you can have Realtors from other parts of the country linking to you, professional web design news sites, web developers, anything related to web design and development or to your region of the country if you are using keywords like "columbia web design".

10. Your linking strategy within your pages and your code can affect indexing and ranking.

MSN quote: "Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly.

If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages....

Links embedded in menus, list boxes, and similar elements are not accessible to web crawlers unless they appear in your site map.

Keep the text that you want indexed outside of images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is displayed on your page outside of a company logo.

MSNBot is the MSN Search web crawler that automatically crawls the Web to add information to our search index. MSNBot crawls the web by looking for links within websites.

So one of the best ways to ensure that MSNBot can find your website is to include valuable content that other sites will want to link to. While MSNBot crawls billions of web pages, not every page that we crawl is indexed.

For a site to be indexed, it must meet specific standards for content, design, and technical implementation.

For example, if your site’s link structure does not provide links to each page on your site, MSNBot may not be able to find all of your site’s pages.

Make sure that your site adheres to our design guidelines, which will help you place important content in searchable elements of the page.

Also ensure that your site does not violate any of the technical guidelines that can prevent appropriate ranking."

11. Meta Tag Description is important to MSN.

MSN recommends the following: "As the MSN Search web crawler MSNBot crawls your site, it analyzes the content on indexed pages and generates keywords to associate with each page.

Then MSNBot extracts page content that is highly relevant to the keywords (often sentence segments that contain keywords or information in the description) meta tag to construct the site description displayed in search results.

The page title and URL are also extracted and displayed in search results.

Site descriptions are extracted from the content of your page each time MSNBot crawls your site and indexes its pages. If you change the contents of a page, you may see a change in the description the next time our index is updated.

Since the descriptions are extracted from your indexed web pages, the best way to affect your site description is to ensure that your web pages effectively deliver the information you want to see in search results.

Excellent content design and effective use of terms that target your message are the best ways to affect the site description that MSNBot extracts from your site. Effective strategies include:

* Placing descriptive content near the top of each page.
* Making sure each page has a clear topic and purpose.
* Add a site description into the description meta tag, as shown here: <meta name="description" content="Describe your site here">".

Think about clickthroughs.

12. Content freshness is important at MSN.

13. In some cases it is recommended to use the Nofollow tag.

MSN, cooperating with Google and Yahoo! supports the nofollow tag. It was originally implemented so blogs aren't used for spamming by having links in their comments section.

However, there are other uses to help your optimization. For one, you can focus your PageRank on particular pages within your site so you don't waste PageRank on pages that aren't important for ranking. Add the tag to all the links that point to pages that are not important for ranking and traffic generation.

Another use is to keep a link from going out to another site and giving away PageRank to other sites, or referring to a site that you don't necessarily need to be helping with their popularity.

Don't use this with your reciprocal linking partners and make sure your partners aren't sneaking it into their links that go to you.

14. Use an XML site map as we do already for Google and Yahoo.
By the way, since some days now, all major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN are using a unique XML site map.

15. MSN gives Site Owners suggestions for optimization gives all the relevant information for optimizing a site and getting it indexed with MSN.

Happy optimizing for MSN! :)

[brian.mark]

One of the tips there that I have a problem with is "Use your keywords in your domain". If that's the case, just for 1/3 of our conversions we'd need 500 domains.

Keyword rich domains are a luxury, not a necessity. If you've got that specific of a niche, it may work out. But look at a search for seo. Result #4 is seochat, the first 3 don't have SEO in the domain at all.

A-typical you say? Try air tools and see that airtools.com is #6, which is below ToolBarn.

Ok, one more try. The phrase power tools gives us 1 in the top 10 with that phrase in the domain.

Understanding that it takes 1000's and 1000's of phrases to make up a successful online business means you'd have to have 1000's and 1000's of domains, which I just don't buy.

Otherwise, there's some solid advice for anyone starting out in this field to follow.

Brian.

[ctabuk]

Brian Mark Wrote #One of the tips there that I have a problem with is "Use your keywords in your domain". If that's the case, just for 1/3 of our conversions we'd need 500 domains.#
Use a long lead html code

Ie optimize the site for the keyword so that it reads

www.mysite. com/co.uk/org etc /keyword-pagetitle.html

Use Directory feeds where you have submitted those pagetitles/keywords so that they point to your page.

[Webnauts]

OK gentlemen. I updated that part of my post. How does it look like now?

[Webnauts]

Well it looks like my tips had a grade of 14.5 out of 15?

[incrediblehelp]

Just to be clear, lots of these recommendations work great for all SE's are not purely for MSN.

Also I still haven't bought into the no follow tag stuff. just see to many times where spiders still follow a link with this tag attribute being used.

[Webnauts]

You got it Incrediblehelp! :) Great post!

[crush123]

thanks for this great post.
the information is very helpful.

however, i have seen many sites in msn with top ranks that have no description or keyword meta tags.
i think these tags may not be so important for msn.

[ctabuk]

It still pays to have them though.

[jenteh]

Thanks for these great tips on MSN!

My site May's House of Beauty is short on traffic, can everyone help me to push up the traffic, please?! Thank you! Thank you!

Here is wishing everyone Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by jenteh

Thanks for these great tips on MSN!

My site May's House of Beauty is short on traffic, can everyone help me to push up the traffic, please?! Thank you! Thank you!

Here is wishing everyone Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

If you need help, start a new thread. Here you can only make comments or suggestions above the tips above.

[littlegiant]

Add your keyword phrase to a style attribute?

I've never heard of this before (and I consider myself quite experienced in CSS). Can you give me an example?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by littlegiant

Add your keyword phrase to a style attribute?

I've never heard of this before (and I consider myself quite experienced in CSS). Can you give me an example?

Classes and ids. But do that with care.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by littlegiant

Add your keyword phrase to a style attribute?

This doesn't work. I would only be as descriptive as necessary here, just like ALT tags. Don't spam in here.

[littlegiant]

That's my impression as well, incrediblehelp. I've never heard of anybody using this method before let alone proving it successful.

[Webnauts]

Incrediblehelp and Littlegiant I got a newsletter today from Axandra.com and they mention there:

"Search engines don't want to be fooled by webmasters. For that reason, they started to index CSS files. If search engines find anything that looks like spamming in a CSS file, they might penalize the corresponding site."

They did not provide any source to back that up though.

But logically and technically, I personally cannot see any problem that CSS files can be crawled and viewed by search engines.

And now my question to you both, to make sure if you are right:

If I have somewhere this piece of code, one or more times in my html document <span class="webnauts">seo,search,engine,optimization,sm o,sem,accessibility,usability,training</div>

and in my external stylesheets #webnauts {display: none} or #webnauts {visibility: none}

am I not in danger to get penalized? If not, that is an excellent idea to have hidden text with my keywords in my pages.

But isn't that pre-historic black hat SEO already?

Well, I think you both know too much about these issues, so I hope you can help me out with that. :)

[littlegiant]

Webnauts,

I'm not sure I get your point but what you describe there is definitely classic black hat SEO.

What I was referring to though is your suggestion to use keywords in class names and id names. Is there any proof that that works?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

This doesn't work. I would only be as descriptive as necessary here, just like ALT tags. Don't spam in here.

First, ALT Tags do not exist. I quess you mean ALT attributes.

Second I said above, use with care. Maybe I had to be more explicit.

If it would be semantically appropriate to name some classes or ids in CSS, like using words being text equivalent and conveying the same information/serving the same purpose as the page (see example below) of block of the document, where should be the problem with that???

So once again, as I mentioned above: "do that with care" means, not naming all classes and ids with keywords, not because it is spamming, but it would be semantically incorrect.

And here is an example to be more explicit. Let take a site of a company selling shoes.

If they have this in the HTML document <body class="shoes"> and in their external stylesheet (CSS file) #shoes {min-height:101%;}

What is from the point of semantics or SEO wrong there?

If Search Engines pickup or give value to those classes/ids, that is another story. I got that info from SEO colleagues who have tested and came up with the conclusion that it works with MSN.

Can you guarantee that it does not work? You did not say that you think so, rather you said it doesn't work.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by littlegiant

Webnauts,

I'm not sure I get your point but what you describe there is definitely classic black hat SEO.

What I was referring to though is your suggestion to use keywords in class names and id names. Is there any proof that that works?

Please check my post above. :)

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by littlegiant

Is there any proof that that works?

No, not that I am aware of.

Also Webnauts I am not sure what your questions is. Simlpy put dont spam in your CSS file or on your website. No confusion there.

[Webnauts]

Incrediblehelp you do not understand my English? I can ask my U.S Rep to correct my English and post again if you want. Should I?

[incrediblehelp]

Never mind Webnauts. I think lately WPW threads are trying over complicate SEO and how it works. Threads about ALT's, code to content ratio, clean code, etc are soon leaving my moderation radar and I need to ignore them because my statements on these "techniques" will only cause up roars.

[0fferony]

Hmmm. I see that I've made a few mistakes. I'll try to tweak my site a bit from now on.

[cyberkid]

One bit of experience is that MSN/Live reads the program logic of your web authoring software. So if your program is Dreamweaver, or, Sun Java, ASPDNSF, or a subscription like ecommerce system such as Volusion or Monster ecommerce it is imperative that you properly form each web page. Meta tags, with proper titles and keywords, descriptions are all filled in where the bot would expect to find them, but that’s obvious. It is just as important to form the navigation or the hierarchy of navigation links as designed by the respective software engineer that wrote the program.

MSN/Live reads programming logic as opposed to how Google merely scans a site in order to determine the relevance of the web pages content. The MSN bot determines relevance based upon software logic, meaning it can determine hyperlinks and hypertrails to form logic. The Google algo weighs the word content and then creates and contrives a result as a function of how it counts words and links and not the intent of how you meant to establish the informational content of the site, or where that information is located. The Google result favors adsense and revenue, as opposed to a purely established result.

[RamyD]

Originally Posted by cyberkid

One bit of experience is that MSN/Live reads the program logic of your web authoring software. So if your program is Dreamweaver, or, Sun Java, ASPDNSF, or a subscription like ecommerce system such as Volusion or Monster ecommerce it is imperative that you properly form each web page. Meta tags, with proper titles and keywords, descriptions are all filled in where the bot would expect to find them, but that’s obvious. It is just as important to form the navigation or the hierarchy of navigation links as designed by the respective software engineer that wrote the program.

MSN/Live reads programming logic as opposed to how Google merely scans a site in order to determine the relevance of the web pages content. The MSN bot determines relevance based upon software logic, meaning it can determine hyperlinks and hypertrails to form logic. The Google algo weighs the word content and then creates and contrives a result as a function of how it counts words and links and not the intent of how you meant to establish the informational content of the site, or where that information is located. The Google result favors adsense and revenue, as opposed to a purely established result.

what? where'd you read about all that?

[erikko]

i'll bear your tips in mind to finally rank in MSN

[learnerseo]

In my opinion, the thread has lost its continuity. If the great SEOs are still following it up, I had a couple of queries then....

[narendra.seo]

hi,

i optimize my site according to MSN optimization guide lines.
and after 2 month i am unable to get rank in MSN search engine.

please advice...

[google consultant]

Why would anyone optimise for MSN or Live?
Everyone should be looking for SERP's results in Google and Google only. Google is the one all others look to be like. Get it right in google and you wont go far wrong for all the others. Some SE's are more spammjy than others so if you want to optimsise for lower rated SE's just over use your keyword phrases.

If you want help with your rankings on Google I have put together some basics that will help you. go to the Website MOT page click on the link that I have added re meta data and you wont go far wrong. If you have any questions please dont hesitate in contacting me and ill help the best I can with your enquiry.

[avoir des goûts simples]

i still consider msn. most of my keywords got ranked in google and i only got 10 % for msn. So it's a challenge for me to ranked my keywords in google.

[sryk]

Thanks for these few tips. That were very interesting and helped me in several ways for my websites

[cw1865]

Originally Posted by google consultant

Why would anyone optimise for MSN or Live?

MSN seems to be much quicker to get decent rankings out of. If you're into distribution where you are relying on resellers this can be a quick way to jumpstart sales.

[sheena]

Thanks for the tips and that was a great post.

[bcdxer]

very useful to me
Thanks for these great tips

[sheena]

MSN Quote: "The best way to attract people to your site, and keep them coming back, is to design your pages with valuable content that your target audience is interested in.

This quote is applicable not only to MSN but to all search engine. As visitor of the site, we can easily attract to the design , navigation and functionality of the site. And the most things is your content and this is the reader first to read in your site. It is both needed for the site as to be successful in the search engine.

[avoir des goûts simples]

Originally Posted by sheena

This quote is applicable not only to MSN but to all search engine. As visitor of the site, we can easily attract to the design , navigation and functionality of the site. And the most things is your content and this is the reader first to read in your site. It is both needed for the site as to be successful in the search engine.

Definitely you are correct sheena. Se's want unique and fresh content. And readers wants attractive site. But many of us don't know this technique.

[RaphielMethews]

Really very cool job. Thanks for these links.
That looks awesome!!!! Good job!!
I Appreciate it.
hanks for this great post.
the information is very helpful.

[Web Design Company]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

....Also I still haven't bought into the no follow tag stuff. just see to many times where spiders still follow a link with this tag attribute being used.

That's something that I have also marked. Is it just randomly picked up or there's something going on behind the curtians that allow some specific nofollow links to be indexed? Would like to know more.

Thanks a lot, Webnauts, for this wonderful article.

[avoir des goûts simples]

why do we need to add keyword phrase to a style attribute? It's one way of spamming right? What is the advantage and disadvantage of doing this?

[sushil]

wow, there is lot of information to increase the pr in msn.
these are the good tips. thanks for sharing.

[simrnz]

It's very first time that I found something REALLY USEFUL ABOUT MSN ... otherwise 90% SEO discussions are always directed towards Google and the rest 9% towards yahoo. I think we people miss almost half of the traffic while we ignore MSN optimization.

[neodown]

thanks for this tips about msn

[innominds]

Thanks for the great list. These are all the on page ones, how about the off-page SEO tips?

[lead]

"With don't use your keywords more than 1 time in the description tag"
----the webmaster all add keyword more than 1 time ,otherwise how to fit the keyword density?

[LiveSearch_Aaron]

For any newbies to SEM and SEO, check out this new blog series from the Live Search Webmaster team about learning these two practices from the ground up. I added a space after "http" to be able to post this link, so just make sure to take it out after copying and pasting into your browser.

http ://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/

[kbeus21]

I really have noticed that all of my link building has been noticed by msn and only a small amount noticed by google and yahoo which sucks.

[m.furqan.latif]

Add your keyword phrase to a style attribute?

I've never heard of this before (and I consider myself quite experienced in CSS). Can you give me an example?

<snip link not in sig CD>

[fizi]

• 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.

[povidiu]

1. Concentrate on keyword phrases of three or more words.
2. The keyword(s) you are targeting must be in the Title in order for you to have a shot at a good listing.
3. Use the Keyword Meta Tag and Description Meta Tag.
4. Increase Link Popularity.
5. Be a "guru" with your subject matter.
6. Use the right keywords that are both accurate and relevant descriptions of your site's content.
7. Target an industry where there is room for more competition. If you are new to the Internet, stay out of saturated markets.

[CoolGadgetGuy]

Originally Posted by povidiu

4. Increase Link Popularity.

I guess this one is common to the top 3 search engines. Though they have different algorithms and value links differently, still, link popularity is very important for ranking.