Am I doing something wrong?

Huge varieties in traffic between Google and others

[jkfjkf]

We all know the comments about having all your eggs in one basket. Here is a list of search engine traffic to my site. As you can see Google and Yahoo are ridiculously out of proportion with the others.

What am I doing wrong as far as SEO for some of the other sites? I know the Google and Yahoo get a lions share of search engine traffic, but then MSN also is a very big player. Any thoughts?

Google 60.17%
Yahoo 22.45%
AOL Search 3.32%
MSN 2.00%
Altavista 1.02%

[tigger]

>We all know the comments about having all your eggs in one basket

yes but you can't control where people go to find information on the net and most go to Google, I can remember where it was but I reading that Google & partners now take 75% of all searches

As far as MSN yes I would say that's a bit low but Inktomi is a real pain to get in and can take months other than paying of course

[mack]

As tigger pointed out it all comes down to the sheer dominance of the search market Google have been able to build. If you where to rank well on all the big search engines you would still find an extremely large proportion of your users would come to you through Google or one of it's partners.

The other search engines are still very importaint though, who knows when or if the Google bubble will burst.

Mack.

[jkfjkf]

Regarding Inktomi/MSN - my site has been in here for about 1 year (without PFI). Out of desperation a few months ago I foolishly PFI thru Positiontech. This made absolutely no difference at all, apart from refreshing my home page every 48 hours.

I'm very confused as to how a page can rank so very high on Google (for lotsa different keywords), but come in about last on MSN.

[mack]

Every search engione works in it's own way. Some you rank very well on others not so well on. It's all down to finding the perfect ballence where you rank well on as many search engines as possible.

Mack.

[tigger]

I wouldn't lose to much sleep over getting a good ranking on MSN I know about having all your eggs in one basket, but I've clients that are ranking very well on MSN and they still only get 10-15% of there traffic from those rankings and until something changes I'm not worry about good old inks algo

[takagi]

In Brett's Boston Presentation [webmasterworld.com] you can find the following data about SE traffic:

1. Google 55.1%
2. Yahoo 20.6%
3. MSN Search 9.4%
4. AOL Search 3.5%
5. Terra Lycos 3.0%
6. Altavista 2.4%
(Source OneStat)

So just as tigger wrote, MSN is rather low, and the rest looks normal.

We all know the comments about having all your eggs in one basket.

Using the advice from that presentation can help you to become less dependant on Google.

[jkfjkf]

Nah I won't lose any sleep, but it does concern me how one sided the search engine traffic seems to be. Mess things up on Google, and its curtains.

Thanks for your help.

[tigger]

>but it does concern me how one sided the search engine traffic seems to be

:) welcome to WebmasterWorld

[martinibuster]

Why is this in paid inclusion engine? This belongs in SE Promotion Forum.

[tigger]

Because jkfjkf was asking about getting into MSN and one of the ways of doing this is to use PFI plans

[khuntley]

Yes, your MSN results are low. Some advice for Ink...

Think of Ink as a cross between late 90's Altavista, and present day Google. Like Google, link popularity is of the highest importance. Although quality of the links is not as important as quantity unlike Google. Ink also likes, more than Google, on-page optimization. So consider things like title, H1 tags, keyword density, etc. And Ink is also the last major engine that supposedly considers image alt tags.

Also, MSN returns matching Looksmart results first. Good one and two word search terms will usually be found in Looksmart results and they will be returned before you. Consider optimizing for the three+ word phrases, maybe creating a few new pages linked off the index. If you have a few external links to your index, Ink should find and index these pages within a few months, maybe 30 days.

Kevin

[martinibuster]

Huge varieties in traffic between Google and others

Aha... I mistook the topic of the thread to be one about the disparity in SE referrals instead of a specific question about incerasing weak MSN traffic.

Ok, here's my two cents: If you are already in Ink then be careful about submitting to LS because their pages will take precedence over the Ink pages- essentially wiping out what's already in Ink.

I don't think you've wasted your money with positiontech- you just have to understand what you're really paying for and work with that. Their service shouldn't be called PFI, it should be called PFF (Pay For Freshness).