Posted by SEO'd in 
MSN and Live are often not taken seriously by most folks. I have been a part of a bunch of SEO teams, and I remember every-time I brought up optimizing for MSN or Live.com, folks just considered that as a joke. But the truth is MSN.com and Live.com are still valuable, and with Yahoo! being oh so close to being bought by Microsoft, you could expect Live.com to become even more important for the future. It’s true that Google is still the king in the SEO town, but as most folks put their focus on Google, you can take advantage of that to optimize for MSN and get some extra traffic (for me personally, MSN + Live drive more traffic than anything but Google).
I know a lot of folks talk about how MSN system can be gamed, but in reality, you can optimize your site for MSN by putting some extra emphasis on on page factors. For instance, title, head, and bold tags do work well for MSN. In addition, your keyword density also counts towards a better ranking on MSN. While there are certain differences between MSN, Yahoo, and Google, the basics are pretty much similar. MSN does pay attention to internal links and more to incoming links as it’s not as sophisticated as Google in dealing with incoming links, but unless you push the envelope really hard, you are not going to hurt your rankings on Google by optimizing for MSN & Live.
At the end of the day, your focus should be on Google, but you can still get some top positions on Live or MSN, and there is no reason not to go for it. As the search industry becomes more competitive, you can expect the MSN game to get tougher as well, but you may as well play it now as long as you can.
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