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.