SEO Step By Step Guide– 57. Making Your Website MSN Friendly

In one of the recent posts, we saw how to ensure that your optimization efforts should be balanced for both Google and Yahoo. In this post, let us see how to make your website MSN friendly.

MSN is one of the top three search engines and it contributes to a considerable amount of traffic to websites after Google and Yahoo. MSN is constantly trying to increase its market share so the stiff competition between Google, Yahoo and MSN can take any turn anytime. Therefore, it is best to keep our books clean with all the major search engines.

It has been noticed that MSN tends to value pages that are more focused meaning, each page should have a topic of its own and the site’s content should be faithful to the topic. If your site has scattered interests, then that page may not rank well in the search engines. This indicates that MSN is also giving lot of importance to keyword density. When you have too many topics of interest on the same page, the keyword density will be diluted and hence the search engine will not be able to make out which is the main area of interest of your webpage for any given search. So make sure that you come up with a site structure that will help you concentrate on a single topic on each page.

MSN does not like pages that are heavily loaded with graphics because the page size increases beyond optimal size of the pages. It is best to have web pages under 150 KB not including the images. MSN also prescribes static links for the web pages. You should have a minimum of one static link for both users and search engine spiders to gain entry into your website. MSN cannot read the image files even partially therefore, you must include all the important content of your website as HTML text. If it is not, then your website will not gain relevance for the keywords that are most important to your website.

MSN too prefers that you include a sitemap for your website but it is nothing like the Google sitemap. You just need to have a regular HTML page with the structural linking of all the pages in your website. This will ensure that the MSN spider index all the pages of your website. MSN spider does not drill down completely into your navigation menu so it can skip some of your pages and they can happen to be your important pages. Adding a site map helps MSN spiders to visit all the pages and index them.

MSN also recommends that all your web pages are accessible in three clicks. It also helps your website visitors in finding the information they need easily and at the same time search engine bots too will be able to reach your pages easily.

All the above are some of the basic SEO requirements for MSN.

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