Web Site Ranking Tips --> Microsoft's MSN

Microsoft's new search engine called MSN was officially started in early Oct. 1998. It has not taken them long to move themselves up in the rankings of the major search engines.

MSN, like so many of the new search engines, does not use its own database of web pages. They presently use Inktomi's database but this will be changing in the near future. They are going to be moving over to use AltaVista's in the late spring of 1999. So what does all this mean to the person wanting to submit to MSN and get a good ranking?

Right now MSN accepts its own submissions. These then get placed in the Inktomi database. From there, Inktomi has devised a set of algorithms specifically for MSN. These MSN algorithms are applied to your page and a ranking is given to it for the MSN search engine.

Sound complicated? It is not really. The only problem is that MSN asks that you only submit one page from your site and then they say they will crawl the rest of your site from there. We have found their "roving spider" to be very efficient at picking up all the pages from a site.

Visit our Inktomi page to learn more about their database. Here are some ranking and submission tips for MSN. Remember these tips will only be good until MSN moves over to AltaVista's database, in the near future.

Key #1
Create pages with your key word or phrase in the title tag. Then use you key word or phrase in the description tag and also in the Meta keyword tag. Make sure that you use your key words and phrases as often as possible in the text on your page and as close to the top of the page as possible. Do not take away from the readability of the text but make sure you use your key words and phrases in your text. Remember spiders do not see graphics so they do not count, only text does. Use alt image tags to introduce a few more occurrences of your key words but do not go over board with these.

Key #2
Even though MSN says it will only accept one page from a site and then ignore all the rest, we have found that if we submit one page and wait for it to be ranked, they will accept another page immediately after. It usually take them 2-3 days to index and rank a page, so we are able to get one page every couple of days in until the "roving spider" does its work.

As soon as MSN makes the change to Altavista's database and we find out what is going on we will let everyone else know via this page.

Click here to go directly to the MSN submission page.
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