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2.2 Which search engines to target
In the last unit, we suggested that the vast majority of Internet users use search engines to locate products or services. This free system of listings is a more popular method of locating sites than paid-for advertising such as PPC and is thus a better way of improving the visibility of your website. But which search engines do you want to be found by and which search engines should you target?
Although the majority of Internet users rely on search engines to find what they are looking for, they do not all use the same search engines. There are, in fact, numerous search engines out there, all vying for a share in the lucrative search engine market. Here are just a few of the search engines that we use when looking for something on the Internet:
Search Engine |
Homepage |
www.google.com |
|
Yahoo |
www.yahoo.com |
MSN |
search.msn.com |
Teoma |
www.teoma.com |
Dogpile |
www.dogpile.com |
AOL |
search.aol.com |
Ask Jeeves |
www.ask.com |
PageTracer |
www.pagetracer.com |
Table 1: Search Engines
As you can see, then, there are numerous companies we can turn to when searching the Internet. Note, however, that not all of these search engines use truly distinct search technology. AOL, for example, bases part of its search results on Google. Teoma uses Ask Jeeves technology. Dogpile is a meta-crawler, which means that it searches all the major search engines for you and compiles results from places like Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves.
This may seem like a bewildering array of search options and a formidable amount of search engines to optimise your site for. However, we only have to concentrate on the largest players in the search engine market as they have the most people using their search technology, and because they also act as search providers, leasing out their search technology to other search engines.
Let’s look at who the leading players are in the search engine market. The following chart, compiled from data provided by Hitwise shows the search engine market share for December 2007, November 2007 and December 2006.
Percentage Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers |
|||
Domain |
Dec.-07 |
Nov.-07 |
Dec.-06 |
www.google.com |
65.98% |
65.10% |
63.15% |
search.yahoo.com |
20.88% |
21.21% |
21.62% |
search.msn.com |
7.04%* |
7.09%* |
9.80%* |
www.ask.com |
4.14% |
4.63% |
3.72% |
* includes searches on Live.com and MSN Search: Source: Hitwise |
|||
As we can see, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the big players in the search engine market, accounting for just over 90% of the total market. This means that more people use their search technology to search for products or services on the web than any other search engine. For this reason, these are the search engines you should primarily focus on when analysing optimising your site. Consequently, these are the search engines we will focus on throughout this course:
- Google – www.google.com
- Yahoo – www.yahoo.com
- MSN – search.msn.com
There are some important things to note about these search engines.
- each use different systems to rank pages
- because different systems are used, a high ranking for a specific keywords in one search engine does not automatically mean that your page will rank highly for the same keywords in another search engine
- nevertheless, each use similar principles to determine the relevancy and importance of web pages in relation to search queries
For more information about our Search Engine Optimisation Training Courses contact Syllabus or call +34 693 475 142.