MSN Live Search

Richard touched briefly on Live Search last week, but I thought I’d go into some more detail on the new engine.

Microsoft fights at the front of a lot of battles. But one historic battle it’s had problems winning is the Battle of the Search Engines. MSN’s share of the search market has always been significantly lower than either Google or Yahoo, although it still manages to hang onto third place (current Nielson/Netratings show Google at 49%, Yahoo! at 23% and Microsoft at 10% – courtesy of searchnews). This could change with Live Search.

Live Search completely replaces the old MSN Search interface. Right away you’ll notice a much simpler, cleaner design and layout, a standard made popular by search king Google. The change in usability is step one to drawing more users. Step two will be to garner a stronger reputation through popular services and better results than the other guys.

Aside from the standard Web, Images, and News search functions, Live offers:

• Language selection: from a well organized list, located under the options menu.
• Local search: growing database of North American cities, with kick butt maps that let you zoom into specific areas; contact info and driving instructions.
• Related searches: This feature helps you refine your query by offering more search suggestions.
• Live QnA: MSN’s social search feature, to compete with Yahoo Answers.
• Video search beta: Video search is a must, considering the popularity of sites like youtube.com and Google video.

Here are a handful of SEO tips for Live Search, taken from Live Search’s Site Owner Guidelines:

• Submit your site to Live Search if it’s not already indexed.
• Adhere to MSN’s site design guidelines, such as well formatted HTML, strong relevant Meta tags, and proper use of the robots.txt file, to let the MSNBot know how to crawl your site.
• If a page’s URL is changed, point this page to the new page with a 301 redirect.
• URL’s should be simple and static. Long winded names are more difficult to crawl.
• Make sure your content is relevant and valuable to your target audience.
• Use traffic rich, relevant keywords to draw searchers to your site.
• Add a sitemap with links to all your pages, so the MSNBot finds and indexes your entire site.
• Your top pages should only be 3 clicks away from your main index page.
• Don’t use black hat SEO tricks, such as hidden text, irrelevant keyword stuffing and link farms.

It will be interesting to see if this change pays off for Microsoft. At this point I still have my money on Google.