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.

What is a redirect, and why are they a frequently employed facet of web navigation? Picture a bored traffic cop trying to manage a detour after a bridge has collapsed. Due to habit and training, said traffic will automatically try and cross the bridge – so to avoid disastrous, albeit probably humorous, consequences this traffic must be redirected to a safe, alternate route. The same is true after a website alteration. It may take months for search engines to reindex and reflect your new URL structure or domain name. So in the meantime, and likely permanently, a similar technical detour should be implemented to keep you from losing valuable traffic to the ether.

Redirects are the genesis of a lot of confusion in the wild, wide world of SEM – because if applied for the purposes of black hat SEO, they can get you penalized. It was common practice in the early days to set up groups of sneaky redirection pages that all targeted similar and related keywords or phrases. The only links on these pages are links to other pages in the same family creating a phony sense of related linking that once managed to trick algorithms. But the 301 redirect is completely safe and should not be feared.

For a practical example, if you have removed or renamed a page on your site, and want to avoid displaying a 404 error page, set up a 301 redirect to push traffic to your new page. The code 301 means “moved permanently” and it’s the easiest way to preserve your search engine rankings for that page. Redirects are implemented differently depending on the language your site has been written in. What works for PHP won’t work for .NET and so on. The common element of the 301 redirect is that they are always easy to implement. Have a look at these multi-platform instructions and don’t fear the redirect!