Please help, I dont know MSN

Hello MSN Guys!
This is my first post in that section. I never cared about the ranking of our sites on MSN but I wanna try to get into that now.
So today, I tried to understand the natural results that come up for "cheap health insurance" http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=cheap+health+insurance&FORM=QBRE
with or without the quotes, you get almost the same results.

My question is, why the site number 1 is number 1???? I might be a dummy when it comes to MSN but if we say that the spiders act like human and the rankings are made acording to the content of a site and of other factors, BUT This site (h...colorado.com) DOES NOT even have the word "cheap" on his Home Page!!!!
I swear this is true, do a search and you will see!

So please, try to explain me why this site is ranked so well for the keywords "cheap health insurance" when it doesnt even have the word cheap!!

In MSNs search box type in:

link:<url>

where url is the full url for the site in question (your competition). This will give you a list of the sites that are linking to your competitor's site. Then take a look at the anchor text (text you click on to get to your competitors site) being used to link to your competition's site from the sites listed from the above command. The second site listed uses cheap in the anchor text, and my guess is that quite a few do.

In other words, Google Bombing works on MSN although it is not as effective in MSN as it is in Google or Yahoo. Just search for the term "miserable failure" in all three search engines and you will see what I mean. In Yahoo and Google the sites that are ranked high for "miserable failure" are there more because of links with the anchor text "miserable failure" pointing to them, whereas, on MSN the sites listed are ranked high more often because of their content.

Hope that helps,
George

I have found that MSN loves inbound links. If you can get inbound links with your targeted keywords as the anchor text then you should be able to rank well for those terms in MSN.

I too have found MSN to be very sensitive to anchor text. Recently I added one powerful link to a phenominal pr1 site and within a week it was #2 on msn for that exact phrase. I think msn is the most sensitive to W3C format. My few sites that validate do unbelievable on msn.

agree with you guys - msn is spam city for backlinks... get some with good anchor text and you'll see instant results. (by instant, i mean a few days)

Ok nice, so I should get links then and I will see some results hopefully

Yes. That's true for all three Major Search Engines...

It works in all three but you get very quick results from MSN.

I have seen many sites rank #1 or #2 for great terms in MSN and they get very little traffic becasue of it.... MSN isn't a big referrer, so don't knock yourself out....

I have reason to believe that MSN is going to become more popular over the next year. If that happens you will be happy you have good rankings already on MSN. I'm not saying you should knock yourself out, but there is a chance that strong msn rankings will pay future dividends.

Some search terms seem to do well in MSN for getting traffic. I don't know why but I have been working on an aquarium site that is getting lots of its traffic from MSN.

true - but some traffic is better than no traffic

I recall reading an post on here that MSN likes to read your pages from the bottom up - so make sure to have your keywords are also on the bottm 1/3 of your page. It has made a difference in my rankings on MSN; however, again, MSN is still a small fish right now so I'd concentrate on G rankings and don't sweat MSN.... it will follow if you good in G

Don't know about reading from the bottom up but I agree with you and doing well in MSN if your ranking well in Google.

Getting some traffic from MSN would't cost any loss.