Search Engine Market Share
The market share of the larger search engines are as follows: Google – 60%, Yahoo – 18%, MSN – 12%, AOL – 4%, and Ask – 2%. Google clearly has the largest presence with regards to search engines, while Yahoo has a decent portion of the business, and MSN has a small but still noticeable presence. Even though Google has 60% of the market, that is still only 10% more than half of the market share of search engines. This means that as webmasters, we can not simply focus our attention on Google regarding search engine optimization. If a webmaster solely optimizes their web site for Google, they are in reality missing out on a potential 40% of searches. Recently, I have seen may webmasters concentrating all of their effort on their ranking with Google and completely neglecting the other search engines. If a webmaster is creating quality content, positive link building, etc. then your rankings in all of the search engines should be fairly constant. Instead of optimizing your site for a certain search engine, focus on all of them and your website will gain exposure and grow even more in a universal manner.