Tips for getting traffic from MSN

[Phaedrus]

Like most people, I get the majority of my traffic from Google...any tips for getting better rankings/more traffic from MSN?

[Swebbie]

Links with good anchor text. I've taken several sites in competitive niches to page 1 at MSN by concentrating on getting inbound links with anchor text consisting of the sought after search phrases. One site is in the heavily competitive dog niche, and I've got 2 top-10 rankings for different phrases that are among the most competitive. But only at MSN. LOL

On-page stuff doesn't seem to matter nearly as much as links with MSN.

[lgn1]

Has anybody ever done well with MSN with on page factors alone, with few inbound links?

[Content Writer]

Yes.

[Swebbie]

You can "do well" without many links for a ton of low-competition search terms. If it's obscure enough, you'll probably find your site ranked highly for a bunch of terms that appear on your page (but aren't searched for). To get decent traffic, though, you need to score good rankings for phrases that others also covet high rankings for, so getting links is paramount.

[CainIV]

Has anybody ever done well with MSN with on page factors alone, with few inbound links?

Yes, all the time. One website I have is a reader-based website. Most of the specific articles rank well in MSN with only one link to them, from my own site navigation.

Medium to high competitive keywords.

Links do seem to be slowly meaning more in MSN.

[walkman]

doing what MSN likes will probably "sandbox" you with Google, unless it's done slowly.

Do any of you guys think that it's worth ignoring Google and shooting for #1 at MSN? Is there enough traffic, and does it convert? I'm curious, as I might try this with one site.

[Swebbie]

Do any of you guys think that it's worth ignoring Google and shooting for #1 at MSN?

I have a site that earns almost $1000 from Adsense every month and gets less than 5% of its traffic from Google. About 80% is from MSN. I'd love for it to rank as well at Google too, of course, but you can do well from just MSN, if the niche is popular.

[May77]

More inbound links? - So, that may be why I am not doing so well with MSN.

Thanks for the tip.

[Demaestro]

For one reason or another I do much better in MSN rankings then G for my 1 site. It is the smallest of my sites and it has few to no inbound links, many relvent off-siite links though.

[tahiti]

from my expereince its quite 'SEO101' when it comes to handling MSN algorithm, some important factors that you must consider are:
- domain name (keyword rich?)
- anchor text (both outgoing and incoming)
- links to authority sites (yes! its an outbound link)
- page title (keyword rich?)
- headers text (again, are they keyword rich?)

some personal thoughts:
i had a few successful sites (in terms of dollars earned) with msn and the traffics are well converted. while google is still burying my site in their sandbox, msn give me strength to continue my development on those sites. since google sandbox will be there to trap us down either way, i suggest we do things that msn like (ie boost link popularity via paid links) and work on google algo at the later stage. make sense? wish to have more ideas on this.

[LeoXIV]

it has been my experince too, when i got out of G sandbox , my MSN.Pages.Indexed started to drop sharply!

[Robert Charlton]

Tips for getting traffic from MSN

I can tell you the first page rankings don't help. ;)

[jay5r]

I'm in the situation with my biggest site where Google loves me but Yahoo! and MSN don't even come close...

Google Images: 333,611 links last month (80.3% of search engine traffic)
Google: 70,497 links (16.9%)
Yahoo!: 5,713 links (1.3%)
MSN: 869 (0.2%)

They're all crawling the site, but not nearly as much as Google:

Google: 434,817 hits, 10.5GB last month
Yahoo!: 51,540 hits, 1.04GB
MSN: 8,580 hits, 266MB

The site has been up in its current form for a year now and had a track record before that as well so it should be out of any sandboxes by this point. The domain registration did change last fall when the company was sold, but I'm not sure if Yahoo! and MSN monitor that or not.

The site is an e-commerce site selling rights-managed medical illustrations. It has a fair number of quality inbound links, but almost no outbound links (just due to the nature of the site).

I've done quite a bit of SEO with the site - and from Google's perspective, it's worked great. It's just the other search engines aren't responding. Any suggestions?