Check this screenshot out and you'll see what I mean: I'm doing well in Google, and fairly well in Yahoo, but all the others I have no idea about - maybe it's just that no one uses MSN search?
As the algorithms are different, so natuarally the SERP will be different and thus difference in traffic. Even though your site may be listed at the top, it gets a small amount of traffic due to its lesser usage.
Want to do better in MSN search? Do everything you possibly can ... wrong. As far as I can tell, that should get you listed very well. My site doesn't show up for miles down the line when I directly search its keyword, but my VBulletin forums are on the top of the second page and its had no SEO work or url rewriting. Not to mention, the site keyword isn't even in the title of the page. I dunno about anyother search engine, but this just seemed completely wrong to me.
Interesting thought... My traffic from MSN is about 0.5%, and I even dont score the first place for my domain
i just launched a site in the UK and 2 months later I am in the top 10 in many of the high performance keywords (as I thought they were) on uk.msn.com and uk.live.com; but not seeing the traffic I expected from msn and live...i think the usage is not there....i got up the ranks by having good content and relevant meta tags to the body of the pages and did some link building....
With 5 percent search market share in the US, you should have at least 1/16 of the google referrals if you optimise it well for MSN. That will be about 500? I guess the problem is this. All SE now give a lot of weightage to Incomming Links. So, during the early 00's So called SEOs used to get thousands and thousand of links to thier websites using Link farms and splogs. Google became bettter because Google penalised, banned, such sites, improved the ranking etc etc, so Gooogle became better, and a clean Site sure ranks well in google. But for most keywords, MSN and even yahoo are still being dominated by black hats... Forget about MSN. increase your google referrals
And have you tried this? http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=378641 . If you badly want to try out different things. Excuse me for posting twice. Couldn't see the edit button:
well, seems like you are getting good traffic from google. and keep up the good work. But i dont think if you rank well on MSN, you can get more traffic, caz Very few people use MSN search engine. but u can always try to improve your rank.
I believe that MSN relies a lot on META tags, which is not a very common factor in most of today's search engines. Give it shot!
To rank well in MSN you need the exact keywords everywhere on the page, especially title and then get pure keyword link volume (i.e. mass directory submissions, article marketing, sitewide links). Basically all you need to do is get a little more spammy
I'm actually doing considerably well in MSN and Live search (page 1/2 for 'photoshop tutorials') But still not getting much traffic for those phrases.
i used to have more than 4000 visits from msn in the past, when at that time i had around 35000 from google... now i have 42000 from google, but only 800 from msn... this is only in six months, do you believe msn lost such big portion of the market? or am i doing something wrong for msn?