Earn Online CashEarn Online Cash By Optimizing for MSN Live Search
Perhaps you already know that to earn online cash that you have to rank well in Google but what about rating well in MSN Live Search? Is this even a worthwhile thing to purse? After all, it only gets about 5-10% of the web search traffic. Well, do the math. That 5-10% is a substantial number.
You also have to consider that those MSN users aren’t power users, they’re mostly everyday people who haven’t changed their default search engine in Internet Explorer to Google. These aren’t web savvy users and are generally more open to marketing attempts than the more Internet savvy user you’re likely to get from Google. If you have a Build a Niche Store site that’s been deindexed by Google then they’re just the kind of traffic you’re looking for, buyers who aren’t jaded and are still Internet noobies.
The MSN Live Search engine is almost like a Google 1.0 search engine with a few little quirks thrown in. Let’s begin with on-site optimization factors and move on to external ones.
MSN Live Search Internal SEO
So far as page design goes, MSN Live Search, like Google and Yahoo, likes well formed HTML that can be spidered easily. It also seems that the MSN ‘bot is more susceptible to HTML errors than its counterparts. A bad bit of HTML may cause the ‘bot to not report the site correctly and result in incorrect or incomplete indexing. To get optimal MSN indexing avoid tricky HTML coding or sophisticated WordPress themes, keep it simple.
On the content, MSN places more emphasis on the meta tags of a site than other search engines, especially the Description tag. Make sure that you have this tag filled out with your keywords. Next, the MSN ‘bot seems to not place a lot of weight on the H1-6 tags or stylesheet font attributes but instead looks at <strong> and <b> tags as more important indicators. Placing your keywords, even the H1-6 tags, in the bolding tags seems to help with MSN. Lastly, they seem to not be that phased by high keyword density. Having this too high may get your sandboxed, penalized or even deindexed in Google but the MSN algorithm seems to unphased by this.
Another apparent factor is that MSN’s algorithm likes to see fresh content frequently, probably more so than Google. This means that scripts like BANS are something it loves. Also, if you’re using WordPress, you can use plugins like post rotators, random blogroll generators, related posts and so forth the regenerate new content on each page load. Since it’s caching algorithms aren’t as sophisticated as Google’s, it is more likely to give more weight to these changes.
The last on-site factor we’ll consider is the domain name. First of all, MSN shows a marked preference for domain names and seems to discount subdomains and folder names a whole lot more than Google and Yahoo do. This means that optimizing a Blogger blog or other subdomain site for MSN isn’t going to be that successful in most cases. Also, deeper URL’s, such as the commonly used date folder format in WordPress (mydomain.com/2008/11/23/hello-world), won’t do as well as single folder levels like mydomain.com/hello-world. On the flipside, MSN’s algorithm doesn’t seem to care if you have hyphens, even multiple hyphens, or numbers in your domain name as long as the keywords are there.
MSN Live Search External SEO
The first external SEO factor we’ll look at are “Class C” IP addresses. It’s been long known in SEO circles that having multiple “Class C” IP addresses, the third number in a standard IP address, when linking to a target site helps. However, Google, and perhaps Yahoo, have stopped weighting this quite as much as they used to since there are a lot of hosts today that will have 1000’s of domains on a single class C by using powerful servers and server clusters. However, MSN’s algorithm lags behind and still counts this more strictly. Therefore, when you build supporting sites, make sure that you spread out across many hosts to enhance your profile within MSN’s algorithm.
Along the same lines, Google places a lot of weight on the authority of linking sites, their age, Google PageRank, the natural-ness of the link, domain age, the nofollow tag and a large number of other factors. However, MSN’s algorithm is very basic and doesn’t really do a lot of site ranking. In fact, almost any link that gets indexed counts the same in their algorithm even if it has the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
As with Google, the anchor text matters. However, there is little need to vary the anchor text so far as MSN is concerned. After all, nobody really does ‘MSN Bombing’.
Lastly, MSN’s ‘bot sometimes needs help in finding a new site. You can give it some help by going to MSN Live Search and entering the full url of your site. For some reason this seems to encourage the ‘bot to crawl the site.
Well, that’s it. Feel free to ask any questions and I hope this technique of optimizing for MSN Live Search helps you earn online cash.
Comments RSS feed for this post
5 Comments »
[...] few tips on how to do that from my bud Frank Carr. Frank writes about internet marketing and how to Earn Online Cash – because he knows [...]
Thanks for the great info on getting better rankins on MSN and Live. One thing that I noticed with MSN and Live is that they give a lot of value to the keywords in the domain name, especially if you have an older domain.
This is the article that I want. This article is very good. This article is very useful for me. Please flag me as spam if I autopost here again. Thanks
First of all, I wanted to say THANK YOU for this site…it’s an awesome resource. I came across your site by way of Griz’s site…yes, I’m another closet fan. I just wanted to add my two cents about this MSN Live thing…I have a BANS site (electronics niche) that has only been live for about 3 weeks. I built it and let it sit for a minute without doing one doggone thing, just to see how long it would get indexed by Google on the strength of the content refreshing alone. It took about two of the three weeks for that to happen. I checked my EPN stats (after 3 weeks) and found that I was getting click-throughs from it, and I was surprised because it had literally just been indexed by G. I checked the traffic sources (good ol’ awstats) and found that I was getting the traffic from MSN Live. I did a quick search on MSN Live using the main keywords I was targeting, and my BANS site was NUMBER ONE on their results pages! I didn’t do anything extra-special with the site, and I have not built one single link to it at all. I simply keyword stuffed the site-wide meta tags, and stuffed the meta tags for the individual store pages as well. Then, I did the standard keyword in bold print in the first line of the content, anchored link within the first line of the content kind of thing, but no external link building whatsoever. This made me think (as you also mentioned) that MSN Live must give some pretty serious weight to sites that refresh on a regular basis (i.e., BANS), as well as probably too much weight to the meta tags. This is so much different than the way Google rolls, and I’m so used to doing “Google optimization” (as Griz calls it) that I didn’t quite know what to do. I’ve decided that I’m going to stick to my regular link building routine that I take all my sites through, and then let the chips fall where they may with MSN Live, but it was pretty cool to get number one ranking on a keyphrase that has about 300 searches a day (not big traffic, I know) without doing a blasted thing. Good post.
That sounds good Pocket Aces,
I’ve had some successes with MSN in niches where I had trouble breaking into the top 30 on Google. If the niches are those sought out by a less computer savvy audience, the audience who doesn’t change their default search to Google, they can be quite profitable.
Yahoo has been a tougher nut to crack for me though. That’s why I haven’t written anything on it yet. The way I do sites they tend to rank well for Google and MSN but not Yahoo, go figure.