Get Successful at the Web via MSN Search Engine

MSN Search EngineMost of the time webmasters focus on optimizing their website for Google & Yahoo search engine and ignores the third most important search engine. MSN is the third important search engine amongst the major search engines. In order to be successful on the web, you should focus on MSN as well.

Generally, for all search engines SEO guidelines are same although, during the creation of the search engine the majority of the principles of optimization that were used won’t surprise professional participants in the on-line market, it is necessary to note several invisible at first glance differences in the optimization requirements for MSNBot, because of which the search engine can possibly be considered unique in its kind.

You can increase the website visibility using various techniques but Microsoft has gone on the record to stress the importance of a well designed, optimized website. The software giant even went on to say that you may want to consider hiring a reputable SEO firm to boost your chances of being properly indexed by the MSN search engine. This makes perfect sense as the MSNBot, Microsoft’s aptly named search engine spider, is attracted to web pages that are easy to read and navigate.

Hiring SEO services is not always possible for everyone, so we have provided some important tips for optimizing and creating your websites impression on MSN search engine.

  • Along with Google and Yahoo focus properly on your incoming links anchor text, so that MSN indexes more web pages of your site than other search engines to get higher ranking pages quickly in MSN search engine.
  • As per the Microsoft guidelines for site owners, it is essential for MSN that you use well-formed HTML code and ensure that your site doesn’t contain any broken links.
  • Create a robots.txt file to control how MSNBot indexes your site; using a robots.txt file is important for other crawlers, too.
  • Put descriptive content near the top of each web page and make sure each web page has a clear topic and purpose.
  • Don’t forget to add your website description into a Meta Description Tag. If you change your content, update your website description immediately.
  • Contents are king for MSN; limit all pages and pictures to a maximum size of 150KB. Adding a sitemap enables MSNBot to find all of your pages easily.
  • Don’t use the irrelevant words on your loading web pages to increase a page’s keyword density and avoid using hidden text or links, MSN might consider it as a spam and may remove you from their index.
  • MSN is a very content and keyword sensitive search engine and if you focus more on to your keywords and content, in return you may get good search engine rankings by MSN Search.

On-page optimization is very much important for Google and Yahoo search engines, but increasing your website visibility in MSN search engine can help you attract good amount of targeted traffic and your ranking will improve in other search engines as well.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Density – An Important Factor in SEO

There are lots of questions people ask about search engine optimization, but this question caught my attention. Keyword Density is a very important factor in search engine optimization to which people overlook. What is Keyword Density?

Keyword Density to Boost Ranking

Keyword density basically indicates the amount of times that a selected keyword or keyword phrase appears on a web page or in an article on said page. Keywords must be used throughout the web page but you do not want to over use them. If you used them too many times, your web site could be misconstrued as attempting to spam search engines or artificially boost your search engine rankings.

Let’s check out the simple way for calculating the keyword density of your pages.

Every web page has a total number of words. Let’s assume that your web page has total words of 250, without the HTML code say roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of your web page will be the code – so just deduct that number of words from the total.

To find out the total word counts of your page use a Word processing program such as Microsoft Word. Copy and Paste the HTML source code of the page into a blank document, then select File> Properties >Statistics >Word Count.

Let’s get back to the optimization part. If you are optimizing that page for a single keyword, you need to figure out how many times that particular word is repeated within that 250 word total.

Go through that web page and count every repetition of your keyword manually. Your Word program should also have an Edit and replace function. Paste in the code and then type in the keywords in both the edit box and the replace box. The program will replace each occurrence of the word with itself…and produce a total count for the number of repeats.

For Example: Let’s says that you have used that keyword 10 times on your page you want to target. To calculate the keyword density – take that figure and divide it by the total number of words on your page. Thus, in this case 10 divided by 250 = .04. Keyword density is always referred to as a percentage of the total word count for the page. So, multiply .04 by 100 to get the right percentage figure.

keyword-densityCalculations would exactly look like this;
.04 x 100 = 4%
The page has a keyword density of 4%.

For effective optimizing that will boost your pages into the Top 20 spots on the major search engines you are aiming for a keyword density of between 2 – 5%.

To save time, don’t stress too much over exactly matching the density of your page to the Top listed pages on the search engines.

At major search engines, algorithms changes constantly so, it’s much simpler to optimize a few pages for different densities. Remember that the page that has the keyword density of 3% to 5% will rank well on a major search engines.

Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Tips