Internet Marketing is driven to a large extent, by SEO. Search Engine Optimization is an industry buzzword but is also a way to get your websites seen. SEO is catering to the search engines so that you are ranked at the top of the list. There are several Search Engines to be concerned about.
Google is the top search engine at this time. In 2010 Google had 85% of the Search Market. This should be your first stop when targeting your online activities. Make your site attractive to the largest player and it will be attractive to the smaller search engines as well.
Yahoo is the second player with 6% of the market-share. This search engine doesn’t seem to have the market that Google controls however, the 6% still equates to over 181 million unique users. Yahoo might be worthwhile to target with your marketing efforts.
Bing is bringing up 3rd with approximately 4% of the market. This search engine has made significant strides in the past few years. It would behoove you to spend some marketing efforts catering to this search engine as well.
In 2010 Yahoo and Bing merged their paid ad networks. They have a year to complete the merger. This means that 2011 will be a year of transition for the search engines. Yahoo search will disappear and Bing will predominate. This transition may be difficult for the parties involved but will certainly provide some volatility in the search engine market. This may work out for Internet Marketers but a wait and see stance should be taken to see how everything shakes out.
As Google is the predominant player and the others are in flux, concentrate your efforts with Google and you should have no problems with your traffic.
Jaaxy provides a Google Competition metric that helps marketers determine the search volume for specific keywords and provides an accurate assessment of the number of sites already targeting this keyword. Searching on Google currently gives results that are highly inflated (See Google Lies). The Jaaxy Keyword Tool has cracked the algorithm that Google uses and provides a highly accurate number for this competition.
