I was doing some assessment of traffic sources for one of my sites in my google analytics account, and noticed that since September 2008, I’ve been getting a steady increase in traffic from MSN search engine. I wondered what I’d done to deserve my increase in ranking in the MSN search engine. I had not done, or even considered much SEO for MSN Search Engines specifically, but now, I’m considering it. While I research the topic of SEO and ranking strategies for MSN, I thought I’d post some notes here as an aggregate of my findings. These findings are randomly collected from around the net, and may or may not be true.  As with most SEO theories and techniques, the ones listed here are entirely theoretical, and should be treated as such. As always, your results with ranking and SEO for MSN search may vary.

• MSN algorithm seems to rely more on “on-page” SEO than other engines. For MSN, you may want to focus more on this in for MSN SEO and in order to rank well in MSN search.
• There has been no evidence that any MSN sandbox exists. (Unlike google, where there have been studies to proove the existance of a “sandbox-like efffect”
• MSN weighs H, title, and meta tags more heavily than other engines.
  • Meta tags, and title tag should BE the keyword(s) or phrase you are trying to rank for.
  • H tags should closely, but not exactly, resemble your title tag.
  • Use bold, italics, underline (at 50% utilization only) for your keyword(s) or phrase
• MSN search SEO considers keywords in URLS, although there is talk around the net of this attribute lessening in importance.
• Keyword density it at least as important with MSN SEO as it is with other engines.
• For new sites, optimize on-page SEO, then wait 3 months before building backlinks.

I’m sure that there are lots of others. The one thing that seemed to be unique to my site at the time my MSN SEO improved was that I switched web hosts. Not sure if that is a coincidence or not.