Live.com Loves KWs in the URL
I’ve spent a lot of time running searches a Live.com this week and noticed that, more than any of the other engines, Live seems to rank domains and pages that have the keywords in the URL, and the domain name. This appears to work equally effectively for subdomains, so using a subdomain strategy when targeting Live in particular may be a great way to go. Of course, they’re one of the most active engines about algo shifts, so it may not last for long, but its certainly effective right now.
Use AdLabs Demographic & KW Tools
The MSN AdLabs tools aren’t popularly mentioned in the SEO world, but they’re incredibly valuable, and from what I’ve seen, pretty accurate.
- Demographics of your competitors’ sites – http://adlab.msn.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx
- Detect commercial intent – http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/OCI.aspx
- Find “similar” keywords – http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx
- Cool results clustering (determine what pages are related) – http://adlab.msn.com/SRC/SRC.aspx
- Seasonal keyword forecasting – http://adlab.msn.com/Forecast/
- Content categorization – http://adlab.msn.com/kts/CCAT.aspx
- Search funnel data (useful to understand a query path) – http://adlab.msn.com/SearchFunnel/
The full list is here – http://adlab.msn.com/default.aspx – note that you need to use IE for many of these, as it breaks down in Firefox 
Using the Juicy Links Tool to Great Effect
The new Juicy Links Tool for premium members is a paradise for link builders, so long as you know how to search. My recommendation – use terms like:
- directory
- add url
- submit site
- resource links
- recommended sites
- add profile
in conjunction with your primary keyword phrases and you can really put together a fantastic list of potential targets for link acquisition. We tried these searches a couple times and were blown away with the value we could get from it.
Ad Copy Influences Actions, Not Just CTR
Mindvalley labs had a couple good posts on this topic a few months back (this one and this one). Both illustrate that keywords in your ad copy (whether it’s a sponsored ad in the paid results or your title & meta description in the organic results) don’t just affect whether people click through to your site more often – they actually influence the degree to which those visitors take action.
That’s a pretty remarkable discovery, and it suggests that if you’ve been concentrating solely on CTR as the metric for your web-based ads, you might be losing out. Make sure that as you test copy, you watch not only CTR, but conversion rates as well. You never know when an ad might send you less traffic, but more conversions.
