In the world of search engine marketing, we often refer to Google, Yahoo and MSN as "The Big Three". While there are literally thousands of search engines in use today, these 3 engines will almost always drive the most traffic to your site.
Google dominates among these holding approximately 45 - 50% of market share among search engine users. Yahoo comes in second with about 25-30% while MSN and second tier search engines (such as Ask.Com) make up the remainder.
Having worked on hundreds of websites across a wide range of industries, in all most every case web analytics clearly show that Google refers more traffic than any other single source, often sending more site traffic than all other search engines combined. Unless your market research tells you that your particular audience favors a different search engine (highly unlikely), it makes sense to focus your search engine marketing efforts on Google.
To a large extent, much of the work you'll do on your website to gain top search engine rankings on Google will help you with other search engines as well. However, a top ranking in Google does not insure a top ranking in Yahoo, MSN or other search engines. Why? This is due to the differences in search engine algorithms, i.e; the computation of your site's relevance by the various search engines.
To understand this, it helps to think of the different search engines as different brands of vehicles. For example, Ford, Chevy and Toyota all make pickup trucks and for the most part they are very similar. While they all provide basic transportation, there are significant differences in how these vehicles are manufactured. The same is true with search engines.
While they all provide the same basic service, results across search engines are likely to be different because they use different criteria to determine which websites to display when a user types in a search keyword or keyphrase. There are a number of different criteria search engines use to rank websites. Page titles, keyword density and links to your website are just a few of these. If one search engine give more or less weight to any of these criteria, their results will display differently.
For example, we know that Google puts a lot of weight on inlinks. Inlinks are links to your site from another site. Think of inlinks as a "vote" for your site. The more votes, the higher your rankings on google. Let's assume we have two websites that are exactly identical. Site A has 10 incoming links, site B has 30 incoming links. Site B would rank higher for a specific keyword because it has higher relevance (according to Googles algorithm).
Google also uses a proprietary "PageRank" measurement to determine the overall importance of your website. You can read more about Google Pagerank at here. Other factors that can influence your ranking include how well your site has been optimized for search engines, the age of your domain, having listings in influential directories such as the Yahoo Directory, Dmoz and others. To get a snapshot of how your site stacks up, I highly recommend the Firefox SEO Toolbar from SEOBOOK.Com (See screenshot below:
Watch for the next post in this series - Coming soon!