How do I rank higher in Live.com (MSN)? Internal links.

The big three search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN all do search slightly differently. They each have there own secret sauce on what is considered relevant. Whereas in Google I find that I have to have a good synergy of different SEO techniques to rank high, oftentimes I find for Yahoo and MSN just one tactic can have an inflated result.

MSN’s search engine is now Live.com. What seems to work in MSN is good internal linking, which means links from your own site to other pages within your site. And that makes sense. If the job for search engines is to return relevant webpages on your search, how are they going to determine which pages are more important from within your site? Remember, each link to a page of your site is a vote, and if each page in your site has only a single vote (link) then, linkwise, they are all equal.

Like most sites, each page has one link (or at the most, 2 links) into each of the pages of their site, usually from the navbar. This is done because of ease of maintenance, but ease of maintenance has little to do with SEO. The key is to look for additional ways to link to the important areas of your site.

On one SEO project I linked back to a page from a popup page designed for appointment registrations. On the person’s name I linked it back to their profile. From that single link I saw a 230% rise in accuracy in hitting that person’s profile page in Live.com on searches for their name.

One additional link: 230% rise in accuracy. That made a difference because:

• My competitors only had single links to their profiles
• My site was already highly ranked
• I discovered through testing that live.com treated internal links with more importance.

What you are doing is in essence saying “Pay attention to this page. I recognize it as an important page, and so should you, Search Engine spider.”

Because, if you don’t know which pages in your site are important, how do you expect the Search Engines to know? Tell them.

How do I rank higher in Yahoo? Use an XML Sitemap

Here’s a secret SEO tip of the week: XML Sitemaps work exceedingly well for Yahoo.  This doesn’t seem to be well known, at least I can’t find it from casual searches. After paying a ton to be a part of Yahoo’s Search Submit Pro Trusted Feed, we decided to cut loose from that program since it was not paying off in terms of conversions.  Subsequently, our rankings went from the first page of results to nonexistent.

This went on for 9 long months. I joined the company in month 8 and asked around if an updated XML sitemap had been submitted to Yahoo. Everyone I talked to seemed to think that the former SEO Analyst had already submitted one. But I couldn’t find any evidence of that, so I submitted an updated one. Results: First page results 93% of the time for the search phrases we target. This occurred over a 4 month period. All from submitting an XML Sitemap and then an updated one 2 months later.

The reason I submitted an updated sitemap was that I discovered that Yahoo was listing web pages from our site that no longer existed. After some digging I realized that the URLs listed in Yahoo had variables that only existed in our old XML sitemap. It was then I had the theory that Yahoo weighed XML sitemap submissions higher. Once I submitted an XML sitemap and saw immediate results I knew my hunch was correct. Yahoo, at least at the time of submission, seemed to almost take the XML sitemap wholehog and apply it to its results.

Your mileage may vary: search engines change their algorithms all the time. What worked in the past 6 months for me may no longer work.  Of the three things that affect search engine results:

1. What you do to your site
2. What your competitors do on their sites
3. What the Search Engines do to their algorithms

- of the three, you only control one: what you do to your site.  Yahoo just went through another algorithm change, so we’ll have to see if this affects how XML Sitemaps affect Yahoo rankings, but this worked very effectively for me (as you can see from the chart above).