MSN Search a Real Search Engine

SEO News

Finally out of beta and moving forward.  What does it take to get high ranking on MSN Search? If your looking for a silver bullet that will blow away your competition, you won't find one. As a new engine some of the old tricks still work with them but there's no reason to believe MSN will leave these exploits in place for long.  The programmers will be making algorithm changes rather quickly so expect fluctuations in the SERP's

Using solid acceptable SEO methods will win out over the tricksters looking for tricks to fool the search engines. MSN seems to favor a higher than usual keyword density but doesn't seem to be as important as the others, It looks for the usual on-page elements

 

the title of your page (the text between your <title></title> tags),

the copy and headers found on your page,

the anchor text of your inbound links (the visible text in the links from other sites to yours),

the anchor text of your internal links (the visible text in the links between the different pages on your site),

your domain name (whenever possible),

your description meta tag,

your keywords meta tag,

your file and directory names,

and your image alt tags (such as <img alt="gameboy advance"…>).

 

The always-important link popularity factor

As with nearly every other search engine, your rank on MSN is based, to a large degree, on the number and quality of links you have pointing to your site (aka, incoming, inbound or back links). Undeniably, the best way to get your pages indexed and highly ranked by MSN Search is to have lots of good incoming links.

Don't get caught-up in over optimizing for this search engine good content and incoming links are work well spent.