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How Important is MSN to Search Marketers?

Posted By: Mercedes Aspland | Posted On: 2008-12-05 | Article ID: 123261

Most search marketers will focus on Google when optimizing their website for search engines. However should you now also be considering MSN as a valuable search engine? The aim of this article is to look how MSN can help you marketing efforts.

The first thing you need to think about is the search volume that goes through MSN. Well to use their keyword tool you need to pay a subscription. It is not much but if you do not want to pay this you can still use Google’s free keyword tool. To get the MSN search volume you should probably divide the results on Google by a number between four and seven to get a decent estimation. You will be able to see very quickly that for you main keywords the volumes are still high.

Also consider the fact that MSN is closing in on Yahoo as the number 2 search engine. This was shown by figures recently released by AdGooroo. Although this shows paid advertisers, you can now see that Yahoo has 20.4% share of the market and MSN has 15.3%. This gives us a high indication that MSN is becoming more popular as a search engine of choice.

So now we know that MSN is growing in popularity for paying advertisers and that it can get 25% of the search volume of Google for some keywords. This might still seem like a waste of time to focus on. However it is worth considering the type of people that will use MSN to search. There is some evidence that a lot of people that use it are older and are generally ready to buy. It then makes your efforts seem like they could be very worthwhile in deed.

There are some other advantages, then main one being that it is much easier to optimize for MSN than it is for Google. Particularly for the high competition phrases that bring the most traffic. The main reasons for this are that the search algorithm is different for MSN than it is for Google. There is also the fact that less search marketers are focusing on MSN so if you are you will be ahead of your competitors.

Let’s consider some of the main components for getting to the top of MSN:

1. Meta Tags - MSN still puts a high weight on your meta tags. In particular they will still use your meta description to rank your website where Google will ignore it completely. So if you write a meta description which is about 250 characters long and contains your keywords that will help. Remember not to cram in your keywords. They should appear no more than twice.

2. Content - It is usually good to have around 250-350 words on your home page, split into 3 paragraphs. You should then make sure your keyword appears once in each paragraph.

3. Links - Get links back to your site and remember than Google PageRank is not taken into account by MSN. Make sure your keywords appear in the anchor text of your links. This can be done through articles, and blog posts with links back to your site.

If you put the above three steps into action you will find that your website will quickly move up the rankings, a lot more quickly than it would on Google. However one plus point of doing this is you will also be helping your Google efforts. So it might take longer on Google but you will begin to have an effect there as well.

 

Article Source: http://www.articlecell.com

About The Author
Mercedes Aspland
If you have found this article useful then you can get more information from Dazines - search optimization, London UK. Dazines - website design and web development company London UK



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