MSN Search Engine Algorithms and Its relevance

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When we talk about search engines, Google figures prominently due to its huge popularity among searchers as well as webmasters. As a matter of fact, it holds a market share of about 50% in the world of internet search engines. The search engine that is considered as the second best to Google is Yahoo! whose market share is about 25%. MSN comes on the third with a market share of about 15%. However, given the volume of searches performed in MSN on a daily basis, it has immense potential to bring targeted traffic to your site. Though, each search engine has its own algorithm for giving preferences to the websites while ranking them in the search results, most of these ranking criteria remain same for all search engines. However, it is important to know the key specifications in respective algorithms of each search engine before you start optimizing your website for a particular search engine.

Typical Features of MSN Algorithm

MSN follows the same procedures for ranking a website like the rest of the search engines do. It spiders the pages in the web, indexes them in the database, and then applies the algorithm to generate search results. Hence, it should be remembered that your site should be spiderable to get indexed by any search engine.

Meta Tags

MSN puts heavy emphasis on meta tags while deciding the ranking. Other search engines such as Google and Yahoo do not rely on meta tags as much. For instance, MSN tends to weigh the title tag way too much. Hence, a succinct Title with all the targeted keywords stuffed in it will do wonders for your site in MSN ranking. Naturally, it allows a great opportunity to the SEO professionals to manipulate the search results of MSN. This is probably why MSN’s results are inaccurate at times. Well-written meta tags will not only get your higher rank in MSN but also benefit you site from other search engines standpoint as well.

Many webmasters leave the description blank. This is really risky as MSN bot may not be able to crawl your website without the description metatag and you might lose big time in the game.

Keywords

Although keywords are important for all search engines, but MSN tends to put enormous emphasis on on-page factors and less on the off-page factors. For instance, there should be lots of targeted keywords in the page to rank higher in MSN. On the other hand, Google, along with the on-page factors, also puts emphasis on the off-page factors such as backlinks. However, you can not afford to ignore Google while optimizing your site for MSN. After all, nobody wants to lose their rank in Google. Hence, if you want to rank higher in MSN, you can inflate the density of your keyword in the pages by putting a few keywords in the file names, domain names, around the top of the page as well. However, while doing so caution needs to be taken that it doesn’t lead to spamming as you might get banned by Google. If you want create tow separate pages to skirt this problem, it will take a lot of pain besides being treated as duplicate content by search engines.