Search Engine Optimisation Tips | C2 Web Design

The new player - MSN

You may have seen the recent television, media and online adverts for Microsofts MSN search engine. The reason for this is MSN is realising it needs to step up a gear to start seriously competing with Google. The main benefits to small businesses is that it is generally considered easier to get a higher position on MSN than Google – plus with the recent advertisements, it has meant a growing number of visitors to MSN.

Where Google’s search engine rankings are generally based at 30% for the website itself and 70% offline work (i.e. back linking etc…) with MSN this is the other way around, meaning you have a greater control of the things that can bring higher search engine rankings.

With MSN (much like Yahoo) content is King. MSN loves words and content. It loves optimised and relevant Titles, it has seen to favour META tags and the new improved MSN seems to like good relevant website addresses where your keyword appears in your URL.

This means that you need to ensure your Title tag (as we discussed in a previous newsletter) is very optimised for your keyword – plus you need to start ensuring that your site is not made up of mostly images where no text is present. There needs to be text, relevant text – anywhere near 100 words (with around 7-10 of these words being your main keywords). Add you keywords within your META tags, for both Description and Keywords, but make sure you write these as good copy rather than simply keyword stuffing them, and make sure you have ALT (alternative) tags for all images on your site. With regards to your website address this may be impossible to change at this time, but something to bear in mind if you ever create another website in the future.

This should cover a great deal of the on page optimisation but MSN has started showing rewards, just like Google, for the number of back links to your site – but the anchor text (the words used within the link to your site from the website linking to you) needs to be very random. For example suppose we ran a bike shop in Manchester, it would be very easy to ask everyone who links to you to use the text ‘Bike Shop Manchester’ to link to you. Unfortunately if everyone used these words to link to your site, MSN’s alarm bells would start ringing and you would probably be penalised. Start mixing the words together when asking other sites to link to you. You could ask them to use ‘Bikes for Sale in Manchester’, ‘Mountain Bikes in Manchester’, ‘BMX Bikes in Manchester’ etc…

You may be asking why MSN’s alarm bells start ringing; well the main reason is that because there is such an emphasis on linkbacks a lot of businesses are now in the habit or purchasing hundreds, if not thousands, of backlinks from other sites and general set this up with one anchor text. The search engines see this as cheating and so penalise sites for many backlinks using the same anchor text.

In conclusion we have seen that the words on your website, including title and meta tags are very important. Your website address can be a good factor too. For MSN optimisation the emphasis is your site and the keywords you use upon it – but don’t forget the linkbacks and the words other sites use to link to you. Keep to these tips and you’ll start climbing up to your rightful place!

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