Tips for hitting #1 in MSN

Hey everyone. Well I entered an SEO competition for fun and the goal is to hit #1 in MSN for the supplied keyword. I managed to catch it at the right time and was able to get the keyword in the dot com (ex: www.thekeyword.com)

From what I have seen in the past I think this can really help me with my MSN ranking's but im wondering if any of the more experienced msn experts could give me some tips on placing number 1 in google? mostly backlinks? indexed pages/content?

Any kind of tips or pointer's to reaching the number one spot would be appriciated

 

as far as i know, the optimizations is as google`s, but here the domains name keywords count very much

 

I am happy to hear that..however, last time i noticed a spaces.msn.com (some kind of msn group?) and alot of blogspots on the main page..It will be very hard for my LP to compete with those site's..any tips on how to stay ahead of them? (if that makes any sense..)

I would also like to add I was able to register thekeyword.blogspot.com as well as thekeyword.spaces.msn.com..My spaces.msn account is sitting at number 4 right now and doesn't even have anything done to it. Would it be wiser to use one of these site's instead of the actual domain? (I wouldn't think so!)

any help is appriciated

 

--oops. sorry. --

 

title of the page also counts according to my experience for Google!

 

Looks like both Google and MSN will pickup Keywords in the URL. MSN seems to really like that as I have seen many sites rank well because of keywords in the URL.

 

Like couple of people said, keyword in domain name really makes a big difference.

 

Keyword rich title matters..

 

thanks for all the tips guys..my site was crawled by msn today and im already in the top 10 which I figure I should be cause of the domain..anyways looks like alot of se spam gonna be happening in the contest :\

 

I make a flowcharting addin for Excel. When I launched my site last year I put up about 5 little Excel flowcharting articles on my site to get out of Google's sandbox faster. Well it didn't work. It took 6 months to get any Google traction.

But ... I shot up to the top 10 of MSN almost immediately for several flowchart related search phrases. I was happy, but it didn't make sense. I beat out some really old, well established sites on several phrases.

I was left wondering whether Microsoft games the search engines and favors sites that mention its own products. ;-)

 

I agree with sandosso. keywords in domains matter at MSN and so do your targeted keyword phrases. I use the gkw tool. You can get it free at softnik.com