This question is asked quite a lot, so I just wanted to cover it in my SEO
blog briefly.
Google clearly isn’t the ONLY search engine – therefore
it’s not the only search engine worth bothering with as such – BUT
it’s without a doubt the search engine that most people use – therefore Google
represents the best possible search engine to focus on to make sure as big
a percentage as possible of your target market, finds you when they’re searching.
If you look for stats on search engine market shares, such as Market
share, hitwise, search engine watch, accuracast, various sources will give you different results, but the one common theme with ALL the research stats you’ll see – is that Google is no1.
The figures seem to range from around 50% up to around 90% when taking into
account the other search engines that uses Google organic results (Netscape
Whenever I’ve done this research myself on my own sites & clients site,
by simply looking at the stats – it’s usually around the higher end, usually
between 80-90% of the search engine traffic is Google, and I’ve seen
this even with sites that have top positions on all major search engines.
So – it makes sense to focus your SEO efforts towards Google. This isn’t
to say you don’t want to be found at the top of Yahoo & MSN (Live) or
any other search engine (although most of the other search engines are getting
their organic search results from either Google are Yahoo) but there’s no
point in focussing your efforts on any search engine other than Google in
my humble opinion, as Google represents the largest percentage of available
search engine traffic.
Google gets more than 60% of the searches as compared to 30% for Yahoo and less than 10% for MSN. If you want to do SEO than only focus on these three. The rest of the search engines don’t really matter.