Fond a very interesting article today about how to get ranked high in the “new” MSN search engine. It’s entitled Search Engine Optimization for MSN Search - Search Engine Journal. In it they claim:

• MSNbot likes Meta tags
  

  First and foremost, MSN readily admits that MSNbot will actively be using Meta tags for part of its web site analysis. Yes, meta tags are still relevant pieces of code (despite all the nay sayers out there), and with this new Bot they seem to play a very important role within the indexing algorithm. Similar to other search engines, the ‘title tag’ again appears to be the most heavily weighted within the algorithm, followed closely by the Meta Description Tag and if you read between the lines, it is suggested that your best ‘keywords’ should be included in both places. MSN does not come straight out and say that the “keywords meta tag” will be utilized, but by reading between the guidelines it strongly suggests the keywords in all areas (title, description and keyword tag and content) should adhere to each other.

• MSNbot likes content
  

  Content of course is still king when it comes to MSNbotÂ’s ability to put the entire puzzle together. Apparently, at this stage, the Bot does not read text within a graphic, so if you have important keywords contained within a graphic (especially on your main page), they strongly suggest you move those keywords into plain old text format. And hereÂ’s a tip; the closer to the top of the page, the better.

• MSNbot likes small files
  

  MSN Search calls for pages to be under 150K in size, suggesting the Bot will either simply stop reading after this point or in a worse case scenario, may measure/weigh the page size before reading and simply skip the page all together…a page size of 150k could contain a lot of relevant text content, but add a few fancy graphics in there and the total can add up quickly.

• MSNbot dislikes keyword stuffing
  

  An interesting point within the guidelines suggests that words (even keywords) within headers, footers and tables will not be read. Again, simple text is the rule of thumb…Graphics with long or non-content supported ALT tags will also be dismissed…Redirects will not be read either.

• MSNbot likes links
  

  …They offer two suggestions as to which links will be deemed the most important: links from the main page and links no more than three levels deep. This means all hyperlinks on your site should be accessible within three clicks or less from each other for maximum effectiveness.

• MSNbot likes for you to submit your site
  

  …Submission to MSN Search is offered freely by Microsoft but two rules must be followed. First, search to see if your web site is already contained within their database. There is no need to resubmit if they already have you indexed. Second, the submission procedure is manual and is not accepting automated submissions at this time. Therefore you must enter a presented code into the appropriate field along with your URL before being allowed to submit (http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx).

These are good tips and really should be followed for any good web design. It’s just now at least MSN is letting us know what they are looking for.

I know because ProBlogger told me so.