Lessons learned

Now that the MSN bot has crawled my latest site I'm #2 for my main key phrase. So I thought I would repeat some of the lessons learned from my posts in the Yahoo forum.

On page stuff -

1. Key phrase in the title and metatags and nothing else - obvious, but I did not do this originally. I had alot of additional terms in my title and metatags. Once I cleaned them up I saw a major improvement in terms of ranking.

2. H1 text - some people would disagree with this one, but repeating my key phrase on the page in an H1 tag appeared to help.

3. Reduce the number of non-keyphrase words - this will increase your keyword density. When I did this I saw a nice jump in the rankings on both MSN and Yahoo.

On site stuff -

1. Everypage links back to your home page - again this is fairly obvious, but so many people do not do this. It gives you automatic backlinks. Since my site is an e-commerce storefront, I am using Volusion which provides the links.

Off site stuff -

1. If you want MSN or Yahoo to find you use the RSS trick. I just made an RSS feed of all my featured products and then subscribed to it through MyMSN and MyYahoo. Yahoo was quicker in terms of spidering (about 3-4 days), MSN took about a week.

2. Get at least one high PR backlink. I purchased a link from a PR7 with only a few other links on the page. Major increase in rank. This gives me time to work on my non-paid link campaign.

Now I need to work on conversions, which really stink right now.

-Ramprof

Thanks for the great post. I absolutely agree with #2 and disagree with #3 *sort of*. Reducing nonesential words does help, but KW density is bogus. Term weight is where its at. I'm guessing when you did this, your primary KW jumped up.

Let us know what you learn from improving your conversions!

Congrats and good post. But i would like to know what is the competition for that keyphrase and the number of backlinks to your website.

I have found that MSN likes to use the meta description tag as the description for the link to your site when it shows in a search. I think the best option is to make it a good brief description of what the site offers to a visitor. That could help or hinder conversions. You will also want to get your keywords in there once.