Using Freshness to Optimize for MSN - Practicing Freshness
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To practice freshness for MSN, you have to have theme-based pages, one theme per page. You can't write just anything; to get high rankings, you have to write better. Emphasize quality. You must write effective theme-based content. Let your information be unique and valuable; write your content with your keywords in mind, aiming for a keyword density of about seven for every hundred words. Your first paragraph must describe the content of the web page. It should contain a higher keyword content than other pages.
Where to get unique material
You may actually have to write most of the content yourself. If you don't and you collect from article databases, ensure that the material matches the theme you want and that it adequately addresses the key word density you would require. It may be best, however, to get unique content, by getting writers who will only write for your site.
Your focus should be on content, but sales copy can also be optimized, with the same focus on keyword density and a single theme. One god thing about optimizing for MSN is that it may let a lot of sites stop optimizing by using links, and focus on writing great content. To do this you do not have to have formal sales training; you just need to write like you speak, making sure you repeat your keywords.
You must honestly do this and not resort to practices such as keyword spamming, or invisible and tiny text; remember, MSN wants repeat users, to help it gain market share. And to do this it must give the best results around. Help MSN do this, and you are certain to be rewarded. However, be a villainous SEO practitioner (read: the dude in the black hat) and you face very short-lived success at best, and banning at worst.
Avoid fancy, graphics heavy web page updates if you are serious about high rankings (that means that during a slow month, you can't put a product catalog on your home page and claim you have optimized!).
A theme based site is primarily focused within a broader topic. For example, if your site's focus is golf, like http://www.igogolf.com/, then you should divide the content into pages based on focused themes: one page may discuss players, another page tournaments, the third golfing equipment, and so on. Then the page on players can have a link to a page on Tiger Woods, and before you know it, someone types "tiger" in the query box, and your site appears in the top ten listings. This is especially likely to happen if you focused your keywords on "golf," "Tiger," and "Masters," so watch your keywords.
Without focus, you have no theme, and MSN SERPs give high rankings to particular pages.
A Time For Change
Sometimes I search and see websites that were last updated in the late nineties. Many times the information is still timely, but nearly as often it is not. MSN search is a wake up call, especially if MSN ends up with a large market share. That could happen. The company offers a different approach, with its quick indexing, and by not focusing on how much it is paid before its bot crawls and indexes your site (unlike Yahoo), and Microsoft's legendary marketing strategy. Optimizing specific parts of your website particularly for content, and regularly updating, would enable you to take advantage of MSN, while providing value for your customers and not losing rankings on other search engines.
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