Optimization Guidelines for MSN

As soon as we mention of SEO, the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind is Google. Though Google is one the major players in search marketing, there are other players like Yahoo and MSN. They too contribute to your visitor traffic, so let us take a brief look at what MSN recommends webmasters for success in their search engine.

MSN too like Google places great importance to keyword density of the web page content. They recommend that we include words that are likely to be used by internet users while making their searches so as to make our site relevant to the searches made.

MSN recommends that each page concentrates on one topic and it is not advisable to bring in too many points of interest in the same page. The recommended size of each page without images should be under 150KB. Each page in the website should have at least one entry point in the form of a static text link. This will help both human users and also the searchbots while indexing the website. Important parts of your images should be in the form of text and they should not be included under images because MSNBots cannot index text that is part of images.

If you want the MSNBot to do a deep indexing of your website and include all the pages of your website, make sure to add a sitemap for your website. MSNBot will not be able to access the links that are in your menus and list boxes so they can miss out these pages to avoid this from happening include a complete sitemap. However, this is different from Google sitemap which is in the form of an XML file. The sitemap we are discussing here is an ordinary page that will show the structure of the website and that is fully linked to all pages in the site. MSNBots prefer simple site hierarchy and you are advised to keep all the pages within three clicks. The lesser the number of clicks the better; this means that the pages should be closer to the homepage.

MSNBots like clean coding practices. All the tags should be closed properly as open ended tags irritate MSNBots. Make sure that the navigation is perfect and that there are no broken links. Anytime during the history of your website if you happen to move your pages to a different location, remember to have a special page at the original location that will lead users to the new page. Make appropriate use of your robots.txt file and Meta tags to guide MSNBot in crawling your site correctly. If you do not want the crawlers to visit certain folders or pages in clued those in your robots.txt. If you keep your website’s URLs static it will be an added advantage. Try to avoid dynamically generated URLs as much as possible.

By keeping to all the above simple and basic guidelines you can get better position in MSN search results pages. Though the percentage of traffic that comes via MSN is comparatively low, you can still benefit from this traffic.

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