Which Search Engines to Focus On

We've all received emails that say "submit your site to 500,000,000 search engines". Are there really that many? Maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but there are quite a few. So what to do...

Nielsen's NetRatings provide various statistics for the major search engines. Recently, their NetRatings report revealed statistics for 2008, shedding light on the search engine landscape:

Google
August: 60.0%
July: 60.2%
Change: -0.2

January 2008: 56.9%
Change: +3.1

Yahoo
August: 18.1%
July: 17.4%
Change: +0.7

January 2008: 19.0%
Change: -0.9

MSN
August: 10.7%
July: 11.9%
Change: -1.2

January 2008: 12.1%
Change: -1.4

ASK
August: 2.0%
July: 2.0%
Change: 0.0

January 2008: 2.4%
Change: -0.4

AOL
August: 5.2%
July: 4.6%
Change: +0.6

January 2008: 4.7%
Change: +0.5

This is an excellent tool for helping you refine your strategy regarding which search engines to focus upon. Clearly if your site ranks well in Google, Yahoo! and MSN, you've thrown your net pretty wide.

You also can sift through the garbage. While the Internet remains the Wild West in some ways, it also gets funneled through the narrow eye of just a few portals. Getting your website highly visible in these few portals can pay big dividends much like selling pots and pans to settlers traveling through St. Louis in the old days on their way west.