Following the previous article, concerning the factors that determine positioning on Google, I thought to draft a small list of the on-page and off-page components that characterize ranking on Microsoft’s home search engine.
In my opinion, with the widespread adoption of the new Windows Vista operating system, MSN (now Live) will be the second largest search engine worldwide (in fact, in some particular sectors, MSN shows the first signs of recovery both in terms of generated traffic and advertising). Therefore, currently, I consider MSN Live a niche sector, mainly for young and very young users (thanks to the popularization of services mainly used by young people such as Messenger, Hotmail, etc.). Anyway, I recommend keeping an eye on Live as well, because it could surprise us with really interesting developments, given the huge budgets available. But let’s get back to the main topic of this post: the list of the most important factors for ranking on MSN – Live. I admit these are subjective evaluations, derived from experience with my own and my clients’ sites; strictly listed in descending order of importance.
On-page factors
1. Keyword in the Title tag: placing the keyword in the page title always brings benefits (also for MSN 🙂 )
2. Use of the keyword in the body of the page: 3-4 repetitions per page are well tolerated and rewarded, but without overdoing it
3. Keyword in the H1 tag: a good page structure is well regarded by Live. Therefore, a hierarchy of content consisting of an H1 (heading tag) containing the keywords helps the page’s strength
4. Keyword in H2, H3, Hx tags: as mentioned in the previous point, a good structure of HTML headings (tags H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) helps the page to rank among the top positions
5. Keyword in page links: inserting keywords in internal page links improves ranking
6. Hierarchical content structure: a good hierarchical structure of content, through organized linking platforms, is fundamental to achieve good positions on MSN – Live, also because it has a very fast spider that devours well-written links
7. Keyword in domain name: although less important than a few months ago.
8. Keyword in page/directory name: as with Google, it is losing importance but still has strength, especially when combined with the above points.
9. Keyword in Bold tags: “strong” and “b”
10. Keyword in the meta description: currently it is almost completely ignored, but it is very important to gather clicks on your links, in fact, just like Google, MSN – Live also uses this tag by showing it in search results (naturally if the keyword is present in the description)
11. Keyword in the meta “keyword” tag: just like other search engines, this tag is now completely ignored.
Off-page factors
1. Overall site popularity: this is the most important off-page ranking factor for MSN (which mainly focuses on the quantity of backlinks without caring too much about their quality)
2. Keyword in backlink anchor text: until a few months ago, this factor was not very considered by MSN – Live, while now it is among the most important, surpassing even on-page factors such as keyword use in H2, H3, Hx tags.
3. Document age: I put this among off-page parameters because MSN behaves very strangely with new domains, which for about 2 months are ignored and not indexed (it seems like a kind of sandbox fixed to a well-defined time axis), while for new documents on domains already in its database I have not noticed particular penalization or facilitation behaviors.
4. Links from Social Bookmarking: although these sites usually offer backlinks with the “nofollow” attribute (so the spider should not follow the link and assign it importance), it seems that MSN (and it’s not the only one) highly considers such links, especially if coming from the USA.
5. Backlink age
Factors that damage ranking
1. Server downtime where the site is hosted: having a very fast and responsive spider, MSN is among the fastest to notice availability issues of the site on the server.
2. Use of spamming techniques: such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, etc.
3. Slow server: same reasons as point nr.1.
As with the list of factors characterizing ranking on Google, this list should also be taken only as a guideline, a starting point to begin studying optimized sites, not only for Google, not only for MSN, not for all search engines but exclusively thinking about users. Because that’s exactly what search engines aim for: to have many visitors, so they try to give their users what they are looking for, to retain them.
Pubblicato in Digital Marketing
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