MSN SEO Tips and Tricks?

MSN seems to be the last SE that can't seem to have any luck with...

Does anyone have any good reference sites for optimizing in MSN?

thanks in advance.

I don't know about any "tricks" or anything, but from my point of view it certainly seems as though MSN search results show more of a tendency to weigh content and higher keyword density than say Google - which obviously weighs inbound linking with more weight...

Keep on this board...

I might be way out of date here, but about 6 months ago the one sure way to get a decent listing in MSN was to include your site in the zeal directory. I mentioned ISO 14001 (environmental standard) in a client's listing and it went right to the top for those keywords.

Results like that don't give you a great deal of faith in MSN. Let's see what happens when they start trying to take over the world.
:smile:
<edit> Just had a look at the other posts in this section. Looks like I'm not out of date after all </edit>

Strange, I have the oposite problem, can't get nice rankings at any search engine except MSN, where I am in the top 5 for many keywords. I've tried to figure out the way MSN ranks sites, but I still don't get it.


BTW, Zeal is only for non-profit websites.

Zeal no longer matters...when MSN dropped Looksmart, it would appear as though the Zeal listings lost their relevence.

Cygnus

Hi jukemann,

It is a difficult to know what to know without any serps to look at.
I must be doing something right, I hope :-)

Does it take long for a page to be included in MSN? I've had loads of pages crawled but less than a trickle of traffic from MSN. Does it have a dance once in a while like the old google?

Sheepo

Take a look at your SE referrals. You will likely see that MSN accounts for considerably less than 10%; with Google, Yahoo, and Ask being your best source of referrals. That being the case, why would you want to SEO for MSN? If I rank well in MSN... fine... if not... I don't worry about it. If and when MSN starts to really do something (their new search engine push??), then I will start to pay attentions to MSN. Until then, only Google and possibly Yahoo get the attention.

Does everyone else get a lot of referrers from ask?
A look at my logs shows 1000 Google, 600 Yahoo, 135 MSN and 15 ask.

Do you think I need to look at the ask forum?

Don't Ask!! :-D

Good one, SEO_AM. :smile:

That looks fairly regular to me. I get barely any from Ask but am largely dominated by Google and somewhat Yahoo...

There must be something we don't know ephricon. Ask even has it's own section on seo chat. Must be that visitors like to see only google sourced adverts above the fold.

Back to the MSN thing. I did a very minimal amount of research (typed in MSN directory into Google) and it looks like while they don't have the same tie up with looksmart since January, they still have an agreement to use looksmart's directory info when they want to. My sites are still listing well in MSN so I'm guessing that might be part of the reason. Irrelevant though - things will change completely when they start generating their own results for real.

My site seems to be good in MSN. I just followed the standard things in SEO that i had herd about, meta matching the content - content at top of page - alt tags same as keywords and so on, it seems to like the title and description of pages a lot.

i basically just kept tying messing around with my site using the below tool and trying to get 100% without my site looking crap and crammed with text.

http://www.widexl.com

(click on meta tool - the link tool is quite good but im never sure about them kind of tools)