One of the primary goals for most search marketing is to rank highly in the Google search engine results page (SERP). While this might seem largely short sighted, the fact is that Google is by far the most popular search engine of them all and accounts for a majority of all searches conducted on the Internet. However, although Live Search (formerly MSN Search) is third in the league table of English language search engines it can still account for a good number of targeted visitors and certainly shouldn’t be overlooked completely when undertaking your search marketing campaign.

Spammy Results Abound?

All the search engines operate differently and while Google and Yahoo are seen largely to have eliminated spammy results from their indexes, a lot of users believe MSN to be trailing behind in this respect. That shouldn’t be used as an excuse to employ black hat techniques, but it does provide us with clearer evidence of the kind of white hat practice that will help a page rank well in MSN Live Search.

Link Popularity And Poprank

Plans are afoot to improve the Poprank (MSNs measure of the value of your site’s popularity) formula but they are currently less discerning over the quality of links that point to your site. Reciprocal links, links from unpopular sites, and masses of links collected at once can help push pages to the top of the MSN ranking but they will do little to assist in Google or Yahoo.

Keywords In Domain Names

Keyword rich domain names and URLs also prove popular; again, a tactic that is often employed by the less ethical websites (although that doesn’t necessarily mean that a good URL using a relevant keyword is a bad thing). The same is also true of sites that employ their keywords in Meta and HTML tags.

Keyword Density And Word Count

Live Search seems to prefer pages with a low keyword density and will happily push sites with very little on page content. The combination of this and the less evolved link ranking algorithm that helps seemingly spammy blog pages still rise to the top of the pack in the MSN Live Search results. However, things are changing, and as the algorithms update they will become more and more likely to discern the good, relevant, popular pages from their less beneficial counterparts.

Less Advanced Algorithms

The MSN search algorithms are clearly not as advanced as those belonging to Yahoo and Google, but they are making reasonable advances. Fewer pages with poor quality content and bad link profiles are hitting the very top spots and MSN, like the other search engines, are attempting to offer their visitors more relevant search results. Topical relevance is becoming more important and it’s likely that longer pages that include semantically related keywords will begin to fare better.

Optimising For MSN Live Search

According to recent figures, Microsoft Search sites accounted for only 3.4% of all UK based searches in the month of June. However, MSN can provide a site with traffic quicker than both Yahoo and Google, and while their was only a small increase in their market share, they have gained reasonable ground on Yahoo.