MSN and CSS-P

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For those of you that don’t know what CSS-P is, it’s using CSS to determine the positioning of page elements, irrespective of their location on the code. Well what does that mean? Look at this page it has a banner up top, some navigation on the left, the main body, some right hand navigation, and a footer. Which is traditionally how pages were built. Now go open the page in Opera … go ahead I’ll wait … ready … now hit CTRL-G. Notice what happens? The content jumps to the top, the left and right navigation come next followed by the header and footer. Pretty cool huh? Well there’s all sorts of other stuff you can do with it, but we’ll save that for another day. The point is when you build a page you want the most important part (the content) to come first, and the other stuff to follow behind.

So what does this have to do with MSN? Well I’ve been doing some testing and have been able to get some really good results by tweaking the code/CSS to get it just right for MSN. I was able to bring a page from #25 to #8 in a fairly competitive, heavily SEO’d playground just by monkeying around with the code. Once I got to #8 I flipped it back, and dropped to #26. I then changed it back, and as of today I’m back to #9. Going from mid twenties to top ten gets me a couple hundred extra visits a day, so my testing is done. If you want to do the test yourself, give it a shot and let me know. I put the date on the page, and looked at the cache so I always knew what version they had. I also found it took about 2 weeks for changes to work into the index.

I only saw some very minor movement in Google, which you can pretty much attribute to everflux. Yahoo moved it up a little bit, but didn’t seem to correlate to my changing the code, so I’m not drawing any conclusions there.

Technorati Tag: seo, search engine optimization.

Firefox users you can get Launchy which adds a direct link to other browsers like Opera and … umm …. that other browser …. what’s it called again …. oh yeah IE to your right click context menu.

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