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There's more than Google in the
search engine world
Keynote Systems released the results of a new survey
this January. The California based company surveyed 2000 Internet
users to find out which search engines they prefer.
Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves gain against Google
According to the study, Google is still number one in the
search industry, followed by Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and Lycos.
Yahoo and MSN have made significant gains against Google
since their last survey. Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves also
saw a notable increase in their standing in the Keynote
Future Usage Index, which measures the likelihood of consumers
to use a search site as their primary search tool and to
return to the site in the future.
The index also measures a user's likelihood to recommend
a search site to others or to use a search toolbar offered
by the site.
Since the last study, Yahoo has boosted the number of users
who said they would consider the site as their primary search
engine by more than 20% and MSN by almost 30%. More than
81% of Yahoo users and 61% of MSN users said they would
return to those sites in the future.
These numbers support recent comScore findings that indicate
that Google's lead in the search engine market is diminishing.
What does this mean to your search engine optimization
activities?
AltaVista, Excite and Webcrawler all have been the hottest
search engine until a new player took the lead. Although
it doesn't seem that this will happen to Google soon, you
shouldn't concentrate your search engine optimization activities
on Google alone.
Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves can send a considerable amount
of targeted visitors to your web site. If you only worry
about gaining strong rankings in Google you alienate a large
portion of your potential customers.
Optimize your web pages for all four big players: Google,
Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves. That way, you're not dependent
on a single search engine and you'll get targeted visitors
from different locations.
How can you optimize your web pages for these search
engines?
Search engines prefer web sites with a lot of content.
If your web pages have at least 14 to 20 pages, chances
are that your web site will get much better rankings than
a web site that consists of only one to three pages.
Another advantage of having many pages is that you can
optimize different pages for different search engines and
search terms. Optimizing a single web page for one or two
search terms and a special search engine leads to better
results than trying to optimize the same page for a variety
of search terms and engines.
If you haven't done it yet, try IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to
optimize
your web pages for specific search engines and search terms.
IBP helps you to optimize your web pages for any given search
term and for all major search engines.
IBP's advice is based on the in-depth analysis of the current,
up-to-the-minute top
10 results in the selected search engine and it is specifically
for your search term and your web site.
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