Google Ain’t the Only Game in Town
Posted by Dave Pye on 16 Nov 2006 at 06:18 pm | Tagged as: Meta Tags, MSN, Site Structure
If you’re focusing 100% of your SEO time on catering to Google’s royal highness - frankly no one is really going to blame you. But as Google, Yahoo and MSN compete aggressively for search market share, they also strive to differentiate themselves from eachother. One of the ways in which they do this is by having their algorithms interpret sites in alternate ways. So if you want an SEO strategy that is going to be truly comprehensive, you should be aware of what the red headed stepspiders are looking for when they visit your site, too.
So what do we know about the different ways the top 3 assign natural ranking? 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/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 future post. Quickly, it means that you link to pages within your own site using targeted keywords. Sort of like a mini sitemap 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 the DoDo. 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.
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 article 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.
Meta Tags MSN Site Structure Uncategorized
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I tend to disagree that google ignores meta tags.
Sure, they may not carry much weight in the relevancy algo, but the meta description is Google’s first choice of text for your search result snippet (well, first choice after the dmoz description that is).
So I like my snippets to look more interesting than my competetion, which means the meta description is a really key part of SEO / SEM.
Interesting how you say MSN loves internal linking - most of my sites are well linked internally, and most perform well in msn. I guess I never really made than connection.
Hi Harvey,
I definitely made some gross generalizations in that post in the interests of segmenting the algos somewhat. You’re right, Google doesn’t completely ignore meta data, and you should always take what humans are seeing into account (search result snippets) alongside the spiders. Thanks for the comment.