I'm ranked # 8 on MSN but only get 6-10 hits a day.

I'm ranked 8 on MSN for 1 of my sites the keywords, Free Christian Music,.

But I only get 6-10 hits a day is this happening to anyone else?

 

now - how many people would search on that?

 

Check out your search volume

http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

 

Popularity of keywords can make a difference, but in this case the problem is not the keywords - it's the search engine. You can own keywords on MSN and it won't deliver much traffic unless it is an extremely popular keyword, because MSN has less than 5% of the search engine market (even though they are the 3rd largest). See this for more detailed stats: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1

In Google and Yahoo, popularity of keywords makes a bigger difference because they actually have enough marketshare to give you some traffic.

 

6-10 visitors when your rank is 8? Thats a lot more than I expected from MSN.

 

Exactly...my reaction too.

 

You don't know what you are talking about and hitslink doesn't know what they are talking about.

MSN/Live currently has a 13.2 % market share.
http://blog.compete.com/2007/07/09/june-search-share-msn-live-google-yahoo-ask/

Most people don't realize that some stats programs don't show live.com referrals and the term can have alot to do with the market share.

I would say that most people that search for Free Christian Music are likely to be young people which I would say most young people use Google.

 

im ranking #1 at msn for the keywords "make money while youre in bed and you drink a cofee in pants"

im getting no visits.
it is happening to anyone?
you are targeting the wrong keywords. before making your anchors, make keyword research, i recommend you to use keyword analyzer, niche inspector (i got a copy of it)

im not a seo expert, but dont waste time targeting the wrong keywords. thats one of the biggest webmaster mistakes.

 

MSN has a small slice of the search market and being ranked #8 doesn't help matters.

 

Actually, a bunch. According to Overture, "free Christian music" gets 128 searches a day. So you certainly have a good keyword.

Most likely the bigger issue is where you rank for that keyword on Google, and to a lesser extent on Yahoo! Also, there is a vast difference in hits between the #8 position and positions #1-#3.

Do some good directory submissions using the anchor text "free Christian music" and you will begin to see your keyword climb upwards in the rankings.

 

How can submit site and keyword at msn ? msn can't search my site

 

link to your sitemap in your robots.txt, i dont know if it works, but now im up at msn by doing this.
you sitemap has to be in someformat like .gz

 

Actually I do know what I'm talking about...I've been doing this for a long time. And Hitslink does know what they are talking about. They are not using anecdotal information, they are using statistical information from gathered data. Compete.com is only installed by a small number of users and is about as accurate as Alexa, so your number of 13.2 is a bit high. Even comscore.com only has it at about 10% (http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1219). None of the others have it that high, but every company that measures the market share metrics will have a slightly different statistic. The actual number is irrelevant, because whether 5% or 13%, they all agree though that it is a small percentage of the market.

 

Don't bother to submit your site to MSN. Just get a few good links to your home page from other websites that are in MSN's index, and they will find you and index you before long. Submitting to directories is one easy way to do this.

 

I've been doing it a long time too (over 10 years). I have several sites and I know the data.

As far as Compete data I agree that it is similar to Alexa but it is pretty accurate (as far as estimating visitors to my sites). Since search engines are one of the most visited sites on the internet it is likely that their data on them is better than the average site. There no way that MSN/Live has only 4% of the market.

I do think that comscore is pretty accurate. BTW, according to Comscore MSN's share is now 13.2%. They have historically had between 10% and 15% percent. I believe Live.com share is going to be increasing due to the nice interface, better results (than Yahoo) and the large amount of people (40 million) who have switched to Vista.

It probably will never come close to Google market share even 10% is worth targeting, especially since Google and MSN have similar algorithms overall.
Some industries (niches) have almost no MSN searches and some have alot of searches.

 

Like I said, the actual percentage is irrelevant when we're only talking a few points. MSN still has a tiny percentage of the market. I'm not saying we should ignore MSN, I was responding to the OP and explaining why there is low traffic. I don't think you can really argue with that. I think we've hijacked this thread long enough though, so lets bring it back to the topic at hand.