Boy, it sure is easy to get a top rank at MSN. One of my old sites, that I never paid any attention to, is #11 right now for my main keyword, which shows over 3 million results. Yesterday I optimized and put in some of my knowledge... the cache from my site is from February 8th, I am waiting for the new optimized page to get cached, and I will post here my new rank as soon as I get it. I can't wait to see if I have really cracked their algo. If only MSN had more traffic...
Not confidential, just give me a few days to see if it actually works... I'd be happy to get more people switching to MSN...
I am trying something similar. My site ranks #3 for my main keyword and #10 for a competitve keyword which I did not even think of targeting. I have done some SEO to my site to now target the competitve keyword. If I can get higher than #10 I will post my new rank and exactly what changes I made to my site.
All I can figure out is that MSN likes alot of incoming links, and doesn't really care where they are coming from. I used the ad network I made a page about 'arthritis pain relief' and did a 'prweb press release' and pointed a small amount of weight at them from the ad network. They rank 1st and 2nd at MSN for - arthritis pain relief (2,245,948 sites) Works for me. Trying it on other pages now Neil
i am #1 of 9.2million for sexual health advice, #5 of 19+ million for sexual advice 139 of 25+million for sexual health, i have only 800 backlinks to my site and i dont even know how i did it, i am sure msn take meta tags and content into account more than anyone.
My experience for 3 keyphrases: Keyphrase 1 I was ranked 2nd. Kehphrase 2 I was ranked 20th Keyphrase 3 I was ranked 53rd. Bought some text links for $30. The results... Keyphrase 1 rank #1 Keyphrase 2 rank #6 Keyphrase 3 rank #20 Yahoo & Google (sandboxed btw) no change...
More info please... Sidewide or single links? Where were the links? (footer? left? right?) Themed sites, or unrelated sites? Did you use the exact anchor for your keyword, or a similar one?
I've been trying to figure MSN out, what I also have seen is that MSN is way more about the frontpage. If you have the same keyword all of the site, you will rank higher on that. I got a few keywords that were impossible in Google, because other SEO companies just BOUGHT it (bought the links, and just had a site completely made by seo) but now I rank higher as them in MSN because they only optimized a few pages for those words, as that used to be enough for Google. To me, I used to work the same way as them, so lost a lot of slots on other sites in MSN I like MSN more than Google though, to me, the results are more relevant!
MSN likes titles, description, some repetition of keywords in the body copy, and a good internal navigation system.
Yes, MSN is much more heavily weighted towards some off page factors than "G". I too wish they had more traffic, but that will come when they start integrating MSN search into all their applications like Word, Excel etc.... AJ
Have to agree that anchor text (doesn't matter where it comes from) is the trick to msn and from what I've found yahoo as well. So, if you use the word "Home" to link to your homepage sitewide - change that to alt text behind an image using the word or phrase you are targeting for the homepage. and so on.
Absolutely, MSN has nothing against SEO. They obviously like anchor text too. MSN seems to give a fair playing field, rather than favor tired, old sites because...well, because they're old and have accumulated plenty of BL's. I wish G would put more emphasis on content and structure rather than fighting spam (read as: site supression for AdWords profit)....currently they're losing on both fronts. But it's "google"...an actual verb in many parts of the world now; so they'll survive. MSN's algorithm isn't hard, from what I see it narrows down to basic and proper SEO technique with good html.
you an idea on the algo? search this - guitars my site is www.fretburners.com. it's currently just a place holder while i get to it ... and low and behold. maybe i can sell my site to musiciansfriend.com now!