SEO experts often fail to remember that there are three major search engines. Though there is no doubt that Google is residing at number one with the most searches and Yahoo! manages to acquire about a quarter of the market, MSN has not retired so far. It holds about 9.28 percent of the searches, but it has a loyal audience that cannot be reached through the other two most important search engines, so if you plan a professional SEO campaign, you cannot afford to leave out MSN. In a sense getting high rankings in MSN is identical to getting high rankings for less popular keywords, this is because competition is not that tough you can be capable to get sufficient visitors from MSN only in comparison to the case when you have optimized for a more number of popular search engine.

Even if optimizing for MSN is different from optimizing for Google and Yahoo!, there are still ordinary rules that will help you to rank high in any search engine. As a rule, if you rank well in Google, chances are there to rank well in Yahoo! and MSN as well. The opposite is not true, however. If you rank well in MSN, there is no assurance that you will do the same in Google. So, when you optimize for MSN, keep an eye on your Google ranking as well. It is no good to top MSN and be nowhere in Google (the opposite is more tolerable, if you need to make the choice).

But why is this so? The answer is so simple - the MSN algorithm is dissimilar and that's why, even if the same pages were indexed, the search results will differ.

Algorithm for MSN

As previously mentioned, it is the different MSN algorithm that leads to such drastic results in ranking. Otherwise, MSN, like all search engines will initially spiders the pages on the Web, then indexes them in its database and after that it will apply the algorithm to generate the pages with the search results. Initially, the very first step in optimizing for MSN is the same as for the other search engines - to have a spiderable site. If your site is not spiderable, afterward you don't have even a hypothetical chance to top the search results.

There is quite a lot of speculation regarding the MSN algorithm. Looking at the search results MSN delivers, it is clear that its search algorithm is not as complicated as Google's, or even Yahoo!'s and various SEO experts agree that the MSN search algorithm is years behind its competitors. As a result, what can you do in this case? Optimize as you did for Google a couple of years ago? You are not far from the truth, though actually is not that much easy?

One of the most essential differences is that MSN still relies strongly on metatags, as explained below. No one of the other major search engines uses metatags that heavily anymore. It is understandable that metatags give SEO experts a great chance for manipulating search results. Maybe metatags are the major reason for the inaccurate search results that MSN regularly produces.

The second most vital difference between MSN and the other major search engines is their approach to keywords. Well, for MSN keywords are very essential, but unlike Google, for MSN onpage factors are dominating, whereas offpage factors (like backlinks for example), are still of minor importance. Well, it is a safe bet that the significance of backlinks will be changed in the future but for now they are not a major factor for high rankings.

Keywords, Keywords and more Keywords

It is hardly amazing that keywords are the most essential item for MSN. What is amazing is that MSN relies too much on them. It is extremely easy to fool MSN - just artificially increase your keyword density, put a couple of keywords in file names (and even better - in domain names) and around the top of the page and you nearly done for MSN. But if you do the above-mentioned black hat practices, your happiness of topping MSN will not last long because, unless you give separate pages that are optimized for Google, your stuffed pages may pretty well get you banned from Google. If you decide to have separate pages for Google and MSN, first, it hardly worth the trouble, and second, the risk of duplicate content penalty cannot be ignored.

So, what is the catch? The catch is that if you make an effort to polish your site for MSN and stuff it with keywords, this may get you into problem with Google, which surely is worse than not ranking well in MSN. But if you optimize sensibly, it is more liable than not that you will rank decently in Google and perform well in Yahoo! and MSN too.

Metatags

Having meaningful metatags will never hurt but with MSN this is even more essential because its algorithm still uses them as a major factor in calculating search results. Having well-written metatags will help you with MSN and some other negligible search engines, while at the mean time well-written metatags will not get you banned from Google.

MSNBot reads content of the page and based on that (in addition to keywords found on page) judges how to classify your site. So if you leave this tag empty (i.e. CONTENT=""), you have missed an extremely significant chance to be noticed by MSN and there is no proof that MSN uses the further metatags in its algorithm that is why leaving the Description metatag empty is even more deplorable.