Optimize Your Website For MSN Live Search

MSN/Live is considered to be one of the most abused search engines currently operating. While i can bring you some traffic, it’s probably not going to compare to the traffic you receive from Google or Yahoo!. While this doesn’t mean you should ignore MSN/Live completely, you don’t need to tailor your focuses specifically to gaining visitors from their search engine. Much of what you do for other search engines will actually pay off just as well on MSN/Live, however there are a few tips that won’t hurt you to take advantage of for those extra few visitors you receive.

Follow these guidelines to make your website more palatable to MSN/Live search engine:

• Keyword Density
  Not much different than what you need to do for Google or Yahoo!. Only difference is that there isn’t any indication as to what a good average is for your keyword density. It would be smart not to go over 5-6%.
• Title Keywords
  This technique is as important as using the correct keywords in the article itself. MSN allows you to prove this fact by searching for the keyword you’re trying to rank for and comparing it to searching “allintitle:keyword”. You’ll receive very similar results.
• Anchor Text
  One of the most important factors for determining relevance on MSN. The anchor text of incoming links gives weight to your sites relevance for those particular keywords. Make sure whenever you seek out incoming links, you specify what you want your anchor text to be.
• H1 Tags
  The MSN/Live robot still focuses on older methods of point out keywords that Google has abandoned. Using the H1 tag on your keyword provides the search engine robot with an indication of how important that word is. If you look through an MSN/Live search, you’ll see that the keyword you search is often bold.
• Strong Tag
  Similar to the H1 tag, but this can more easily be placed with content itself. This is different then simply bolding the keyword as the command is “<strong>” and not “<b>”. Again, the MSN/Live robot does give preference to keywords highlighted in this fashion.

Allowing for manipulation with the tags is something that can be exploited very easily. But again, the number of visitors you will receive from live, even at the top of their SERP, is much less than that of Google on a much lower page. MSN/Live does, however, have a more powerful image search that you should take advantage of by properly labeling your pictures and providing alt-text for them.

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