Whenever the majority of people need to find a website they “Google” it. Google is by far the best known search engine in the world, with Yahoo second and MSN search third. MSN Search gets (depending on what figures you believe roughly 9% of web searches), when you think of the numbers though this is still a significant amount and it doesn’t pay to ignore MSN search when optimising a website.
In an ideal optimisation world all three of the big search engines would be looking for the same things, although this is broadly true there are enough differences between the three to make specific optimisation for each required. Given that MSN has such a small share of the total search market is it worth the effort to specifically target MSN search?
It is a well known fact that it takes time for a new site to feature well in Googles search results (SERPS), Google places quite a high importance on the age of web pages. MSN search doesn’t, this means that optimisation efforts for MSN tend to show in the results quicker. Not only this but MSN actually appears to like “new” content ranking it above older pages, again a great help when optimising, keep your content fresh to keep it near the top. The speed at which changes are reflected in MSN make experimentatation a more realistic prospect, although to be fair this extra speed may simply be down to the MSN search index being much smaller than Googles. You must remember though that just as your page can be appear quickly so can the competitions, the search results in MSN search are much more fluid than either Google or Yahoo.
When it comes to optimising your pages for MSN it is worth bearing mind that the on-the-page factors appear to have much more influence than they do on Google. Text heavy pages making sure that alt attributes and meta tags are complete are the basics you’ll need to rank well with MSN. Combine this with a good sitemap, website structure and some decent back links and achieving a good ranking in MSN search is definately a more realistic prospect than with Google. It does appear that where Google concentrates very much on quality MSN search concentrates on quantity, although this doesn’t follow through to the traffic you get from MSN. It is worth mentioning that conversions for commercial websites from MSN search referrals are higher than with either Google or Yahoo!
Optimising for MSN search can be a great way of quickly building visitors whilst waiting for your potential Google rankings to kick-in, this is especially true if you are operating a commercial website.