SEO Company often forgets that besides Google there are two more search engines which are gaining popularity they are Yahoo and MSN. Undoubtedly Google is the champion among the search engines but Yahoo! and MSN also receive 10-15% of the Internet searches.  Though the searches are less they are good to bring traffic to your site when majority of people optimize sites for Google. This makes us ponder is it really important to optimize site for MSN.


While search engine optimisation for Google and MSN is quite different there are many basic techniques which are common for both. If a site is doing well with Google then there are all possible chances that it might rank good on MSN. However it is not the same the other way round. If you rank good on MSN then it is not necessary you will rank high on Google. There is no use of ranking high on MSN and not being seen on Google.

Search engines use spiders to crawl through the websites and decide relevancy of a website page to the searched keyword. The spiders of different search engines use different algorithms to confirm the ranking of a website. Like any SEO company would say before you start optimizing a site for a particular search engine it is important to learn how the search engine algorithms work to have the best results for the SEO efforts.

When experts talk about MSN’s algorithm it is often said that it is not yet that advanced as compared to Google’s. In fact it has a long distance to cover to reach the level where Google is. Most of the search engines do not consider Meta tags for ranking a website while MSN emphasizes on Meta tags. Another important difference between the two is that Google lays equal importance on both on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation. However MSN gives less importance to off-page factors like backlinks.

Hence it can be concluded that whether you optimize your site for MSN or not is less important as compared to the fact that Google excels all the search engines and it is important to optimize a site for it. This will automatically help the site rank on MSN also.