I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe we live in a Google world. Oh, yeah, Google rules, Google this, Google that… but I get plenty of traffic from Yahoo and MSN as well. And today I’ll talk to you about MSN SEO.

Let’s answer the “why” question. Why should you optimize for MSN?

Because, as I said, we don’t live in a Google world, but in a world governed by Google. (Hope I’ll not get comments such as “what world are you talking about?”. I mean: the Internet!)

Let’s see: Google like sites to “age” in order to give them a PR (PageRank). Google also likes sites to “age” in order to index them. MSN is different. MSN likes freshness.

MSN is Microsoft. It will come as a surprise to you, but in UK MSN is the number 1 search engine. I look at my web stats and see some good traffic from MSN. And I also know that my new content gets indexed almost the second day. That means: regularly updating the content on your website boosts your site up among the first results in MSN for the most dense keywords. Oh, yes, MSN loves keyword rich sites. The sites that Google might punish for a keyword density bigger than 3% do fine in MSN and Yahoo. A strategy that works in all the search engines is creating theme-based pages.

So what does MSN optimization involve? Good content (a lot of good content), relatively high keyword density (4% tops - Google still matters!), unbroken links (so good, well ordered HTML), H tags (H tags are “headlines”), and a good sitemap. Useless to say, always take care of your meta tags, creating different meta tags for each of your website’s pages.

And yeah: write your own content. That’s how you’ll ensure it is unique. If you are not a SEO expert, give it to a SEO expert for review. That’s all there is to MSN optimization!