When it comes to dominating the search engine world there are two figures that matter and they are both important. One is the number of search queries which each search engine gets and they are growing for all three of the dominant players. The other is the percentage of the search market they have. The second is important because it helps to quantify who really is the dominant player you need to optimise your website for.
Comscore released figures which show that in September Google attracted 6.1 billion searches out of 10.5 billion searches. This means that nearly six out of every ten people now use Google in the US as the search engine of choice.
Yahoo! MSN and the Time Warner network all slipped by almost a full percentage point while Ask.com which commands just 4.7 per cent of the search market managed to stay without any change over the previous month.
The whole article appears here complete with Google shares price report but what is really the question here is what does this mean for you as a webmaster in charge of your website’s SEO?
Well, first, Google’s search engine dominance is growing all the time so if you really want your website to appear high on Google’s organic search engine results page (SERPs) you had better focus on optimising almost exclusively for Google.
Second, the other two search engines, Yahoo! and MSN are falling further and further behind and their search bots mirror, in part, Google’s workings so that if your site placed high on Google chances are it will also place high in Yahoo! and MSN.
Third and final, the continued use of Google as the search engine of choice is beginning to also monopolise the effectiveness of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns. If you are using one, Google is the only way to go.
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