Well, Let’s hear some good news. I found that my site www.bestplatformbeds.com get ranked pretty well on MSN for the major keywords I was targeting - “platform bed” and “platform beds”. But when I did a search on Yahoo and Google, It ranked probably somewhere around 150. So what is all the fuss about? Let’s see explorer how these 3 search engines determine the ranking a site and the differences of the algorithm. (Based on my observation and my search)
MSN:
On site:
- the quality of content
- the internal linking structure of the site (how the pages of your site are linked together)
- the number of pages in your site and the relevancy of those pages to your main topic and phrases
- Title, headings and meta tags
- keyword density
The quality of the content referring to the attractiveness of your content both to search engines and your audiences. If you content is unique, of great value to your audiences (attractive to your audience), have at least 200 words, and have your targeted keywords stressed(attractive to search engine), then you are in good shape.
The internal linking structure referring to how the pages of your site are linked together. For example, if I have a page that is targeting “platform bed store”, then I need to use this text link in most of my pages and make it “visible” to the search engine. If any of those pages have good Page rank, then it adds value to my “platform bed store” page.
For MSN, Title, headings and meta tags hold a very high level of weight in the algorithm. The proper use of your page title, H1 and H2 headings and meta descriptions (most search engines today ignore meta keywords) can get you a good spot on MSN if you also managed your off page factor well.
Off page:
With MSN, the off site factors are much simpler to deal with than either Google or Yahoo! If you do a link search for all the three search engines, you will probably find that MSN count the most links for you. For my platform beds site, MSN count 29 back links, Yahoo count 10 while Google say I don’t have any back links pointing to my site.
Since offpage factor weights more in Yahoo and Google, I will devil into this topic in my next lesson when I talk about Yahoo and Google.
4 Responses
Have you listed in DMOZ? Maybe that will impact your Google ranking. What about the freshness of content, does that matter?
Yes, I already submitted to DMOZ, but it probably will take upto 9 months for my site get listed there (my site is pretty new, it has only been around for 3 months, I am glad it ranked well on MSN and get a PR of 3) and I believe that once my site get picked up by DMOZ, it will definitly help my ranking in Yahoo and Google.
Freshness of content does not help your ranking as far as I am concerned. But If you update your page more often, spider is more likely to visit your site more often since it does not want to show the page content that is out-of-date.
[…] time, we’ve talked SEO for MSN. Today, Let’s take a look at Yahoo, which is considered as the second largest search engine […]