Part Two

How do the top 3 search engines assign natural ranking?

In a nutshell:

• Google has many fancies but definitely loves incoming links.
• Yahoo loves keyword-dense content sites.
• MSN loves internal linking and inbound links.

That’s way oversimplified, I know. Spare me. Of the three, MSN or Windows Live seems to be the least considered or talked about, so let’s dig a little deeper. I already mentioned internal linking structure, and that topic is worthy of its own chapter which we have in the ebook. Quickly, it means that you link to pages within your own site using targeted keywords. Sort of like a mini site map on every page, but with very specific iteration choices in the link text (see what I just did there?).

And we all probably know what a one-way, incoming link is by now. So what else differentiates MSN from the competition? Some SEO companies will tell you that meta tag importance has gone the way of leg warmers. Others will tell you that meta optimization is part of any comprehensive SEO effort. The former is true if you only care about Google, as their algorithm largely ignores meta data. But MSN holds meta data in very high regard - so the latter is also true. MSN is a true meta search engine, so this area should not be overlooked or considered a throwback based on what Google’s algorithm happens to be doing.

On a slightly more technical note, other MSN idiosyncrasies include a dislike of nested tables (another reason to start using CSS) and a more liberal stance on keyword density levels before they are considered spam. But the real point to take away from this is that the meta tag is not dead. And remember - with Gates and Microsoft behind Windows Live, there is no such thing as a development or marketing ceiling for this product. They should be taken very seriously by internet marketers, as not even The Shadow knows what’s going to happen to market share percentages in the next couple of years. Because I think Microsoft just bought him.