Thrudigital

I decided to write this article because I am tired of reading useless articles about SEO for MSN, in which I struggle to find even one genuine tip. Tips such as “optimise title tags, keyword density is important” and so on are completely useless because there is nothing like “a title of 6 words is worse than a title with 5 words within”, or “each important word’s occurence should be between 3% and 4%”. All you can find are outdated or overly-general tips.

In this case, I am going to show you two examples of how websites (the second example is from another website that doesn’t belong to me) achieved higher positions in MSN. Please be patient, as I am going to explain you every step in detail. First, as an SEO newbie, I tried everything from putting words into the first and last sentences and paragraphs, and also tried to increase the density of important words up to 8% or so. I tried to modify meta description tags to see if it helps, I put words into bold, italic, h1 and h2 headings and so on. None of these methods worked the way I wanted. I have heard that it is easier to get good rankings in MSN than in Google. Eventually I gave up on MSN and focused solely on Google, until now.

All that has changed during the last few months was the geographical location of my website (aqua-fish.net), but look how it affected traffic from MSN:

I moved the site to the USA in August 2008 and it took more than 4 weeks until changes were obvious in the rankings. Of course, I am expecting higher traffic from MSN as time goes by. Bear in mind that the statistics from the last day (on the image) aren’t complete yet, therefore October 23th doesn’t look as good as days before.

Since nearly every website is hosted in the US, not every webmaster can use this technique. The second key area is your domain name. The domain name plays a very important role in MSN’s algorithms. A few weeks ago I sold “security-doors.org” to a friend of mine. Look at its rankings in MSN:

It is 6th. Moreover, the site is already receiving traffic from MSN, despite there being no content at the time of writing. But what is amazing about this fact? First, that the website has no content whatsoever (though the new owner is going to publish technical articles here eventually). Secondly, the domain is still very young (it is ranked nowhere in Google). Third, that the website has only a few incoming links (I linked to that domain from one of my sites when I bought it). Despite all this, it is still ranked 6th for a competitve search phrase. This means that if your website receives little or no organic traffic, and if you do consider buying a new (keyword-rich) domain, that it will have no negative effect in MSN.

I could test things such as filenames, title tags, meta description tags and many more, but I suppose it’s roughly the same for every search engine. The goal of this article was to show you the two most important factors in SEO for MSN.

Now I’m wondering how my submitalink.net will be ranked for phrases “submit a link” and “submit link” after MSN recrawls it…

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