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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