Depending on what part of the world you're trying to reach, it's well worth it to optimize for MSN. So what does Microsoft's search engine like? Keep reading to find out.
If there is anything that will make the SERPs of MSN different from that of Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, it is its bias towards frequently updated web pages. This bias is fortunately a positive bias, and on its search engine help page, they actually indicate that pages which are frequently updated will receive higher rankings than sites that do not update regularly. Check out http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx? t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm for its official recommendations concerning general MSN optimization.
So here is the lowdown on MSN optimization, but the freshness has to key in with other things that MSN considers important. First we will look at "defining freshness."
Defining Freshness
Being fresh is like going to the beauty shop and wearing new clothes. It is not something that many websites are known for.
Freshness simply means regularly updating your web site's content. By regular I mean at least monthly, and if necessary weekly; by regular I mean activity on your site. In tune with MSN, freshness means updating your content to fit in with your web site's description, in line with your SEO keyword strategy. Updating with no attention paid to your SEO keyword strategy is not recommended (that is me being polite), and will not help with MSN.
Freshness is about content, content, and more content. Freshness is about theme-based pages and pages that have a relatively high key word density for the search term.
Their emphasis on freshness will help MSN give the searcher high quality results and results which are valuable, while weeding out billions of other web sites that simply don't offer good content. This is the main focus of most search engines since they are aware that consistently good results on their pages will result in repeat users (which is what we all want).
Freshness will affect both MSNbot and Yahoo Slurp since they both crawl the Internet pretty frequently. Yahoo still has the advantage when it comes to regular refreshing; however, freshness has not been noted to affect rankings on Yahoo. On MSN it does. And the difference in crawling time is only for URLs in Yahoo's Sitematch program.
MSN Optimization 
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