We all know that to have a successful online business, you need to be seen on the search engines. We’ve all heard of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask but to be hitting it with the big boys then Google is the place to be. In December 2007, Google accounted for nearly two-thirds of all searches in the US at 65.98% with Yahoo the closest competitor with 20.88%. Other brand names such as MSN and Ask covered less than 10% between them with the remaining 3.67% spread between all other search engines.
It is therefore essential to appear on Google for your keywords to get maximum exposure. If you’re not on Google then you have to appear on every other search engine there is (which lets face it, is not likely) to reach just a third of all searches. Only thing is, Google’s algorithms (the code that is behind the scenes which decides where websites rank on a Google search) are complex beyond belief so much so that Google probably couldn’t explain how it works (albeit top-secret anyway) and on top of this, they are forever changing.
This makes it a business’s nightmare to try to conquer the search engine and get top ranked for their trade. All search engines work in a similar way but the challenge of getting on Google always seems to be the most trickiest. This is probably why they are the biggest and most respected of all the search engines.