Up and down. MSN/Yahoo SEO help

This is my first post so I'll quickly introduce myself. My name is Ian and I'm 18 living in the South of England. Two months ago, I created my first website and have been learning about SEO and wish to improve my knowledge and rankings.

On the 21 April I created my site and within days, I was listed in google and yahoo. I ranked third for the search term "Xbox360 forums" which granted I know isn't a popular seach term. However a week later I disappeared from google all together. I have learnt this to be the google sandbox affect. However I have had mirrored experiences with Yahoo.

I launched with a ranking for the term "xbox360" fourth, and slowly this dropped until it stayed at about 20th. I can understand that as competition for the term increased, I dropped but suddenly I've not appeared on the search engine at all.

MSN from the moment I appeared, I have done pretty solidly. I've recently changed the text from "Xbox360" to "Xbox 360" on my site, since I've researched that more people search the latter. I'm still waiting to appear on MSN and yahoo with that phrase.

Now my question to the more experienced members is what can I realistically expect and what can I do to increase my rankings? And can anyone explain the whole Yahoo thing?

I've got:
- Keyword meta info
- Description meta info
- Robots.txt operating
- Reduced link busyness
- Static URLS instead of dynamic ones


Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated and please excuse any mistakes that I have made, I'm new to all this!

you might want to try to rank for game reviews and the like. that search term will likely be competitive on some search systems, and unless you can afford to buy a ton of links you will need content people would want to link at.

MSN is still really easy to search spam right now though. yahoo is a bit harder. and google is a bit harder than that.

I think new sites can rank in MSN in about a week or two. Yahoo can also be fairly quick. Google tends to take a bit longer though. A friend recently had a brand new site rank well after about 3 months.

Focus on your IBL (Inbound Links)... the more the

Fresh content and Fresh content..

Go to this thread Fresh content
http://www.ozzu.com/other-search-engines/what-else-can-done-optimize-t45616.html

better if you post your url for others to check it.