The relative
popularity of search engines keeps changing, but for years now several
engines have been much more popular than the others. By far the
number one search engine is Google. As
of March 2007, Google is used for over 60% of all U.S. searches,
and Google's popularity continues to grow. Coming in a distant second
is Yahoo, used for just over 20% of all U.S. searches,
and third is MSN, hovering at around 10%. This
means that all the other search engines combined, including ones
that you would think might be popular such as AOL Search
or Ask.com, are used for less than 10% of all searches.
Of course some
of these other search engines are more popular for certain types
of searches, such as foreign-language searches or searches for websites
within a specific geographical area, but in general, Google, Yahoo
and MSN are the engines you want to focus on. Their dominance is
one reason why it is a red flag
if a SEO service offers to submit
your site to hundreds of search engines for a fee.
This is a waste of money, not only because almost all of the search
engines they submit to are used for only a tiny percentage of searches,
but also because in most cases it
is better for your ranking if the search engines find you on their
own rather than by you submitting to them.
Because different
methods, or "algorithms," are used by the top three search
engines, your optimization strategy depends on how much you want
to target which engine, both for your overall site and for specific
pages within your site. For example, one strategy might be to optimize
your home page for Google (tip: search
engines generally give much more weight to home pages),
and optimize other pages within your site for Yahoo or MSN. These
algorithms to some extent involve technical aspects of your site
that should be handled by a professional optimizer, but increasingly
they also involve aspects you can change on our own. These are the
aspects I'll discuss below in broad terms, with more detailed discussions
of each of the top three to come later in new articles.
For all of the
search engines, "keyword density" is
critical. Keywords are the words and phrases used
in the searches for which you are trying to get a high ranking in
the search results. For example, a helicoper touring company on
Kauai might want to optimize its home page for the search phrase
"helicopter tours Kauai". Keyword density
is the percentage of the text on a page that is the words in your
phrase. You might think that the higher the percentage the better,
but actually it should only be about 1.5 to 2% for Google,
3 to 4% for Yahoo, or 4 to 5% for MSN. Keywords that are
higher up in the page get more weight, as do keywords that are emphasized
in some way such as being in bold or as part of a list. Keywords
and phrases should occur in a natural way and not look as if they
are there simply to attract search engines. You should not try to
optimize a page for more than two or three phrases, and ideally
a page should contain about 400 to 500 words.
Another
critical thing for Google, but not as much for the other
engines, is your "link popularity".That
is, how many sites link to you, especially sites that are popular
and have content relevant to your site's content. You should try
to get as many sites as possible to link to you, but be careful
with "reciprocal linking," where you
link to a site in exchange for them linking to you. That can look
artificial to a search engine unless there is a "natural"
reason for you to link back to the other site, such as if the site
with a link to you is a local directory and your link to them is
on a page of links to useful local resources. Above all, avoid
"link farms," which are just lists of
links obviously designed solely to attract search engines. There
are several ways to get good sites to link to you, and those will
be discussed in detail in a separate article. But for now, here
is a link to a
list of web directories that will add a link to your site for free.
Yahoo
used to be much different from Google and MSN in that you only appeared
in their search results if you paid to be in their directory, but
now it also sends out "spiders" to find you on the web
as the others do. However, being in their directory definitely helps
with rankings, so if you want to optimize for Yahoo you may want
to cough up the $299 per year that they charge. It also penalizes
pages that have Google AdSense ads on them. Yahoo especially likes
long pages with at least 400-500 words, and catalog pages with lots
of links.
MSN
is the search engine that is changing the most right now. It currently
gives less weight than the others to "off-page" factors
like traffic, so if your site is new you may want to optimize primarily
for MSN. But it does seem to like a large quantity of links to your
site, with the "quality" of the links being less important
than with Google or Yahoo. It also has two user-friendly new features,
"Search Builder" and "Near Me," which may increase
its popularity with searchers. However, these features only work
on Windows computers.
With all of
the search engines there are certain no-nos that
can get your site penalized or even banned, but most of these are
technical things of interest to professional optimizers. I will
discuss some of them in articles on the specific engines coming
later, but for now I will just warn you about one
big no-no that non-professionals might be tempted to try: mirror
sites. These are sites that have different web addresses
but identical or nearly identical content. It seems like an easy
way to improve rankings because the engines could list both sites,
but they can have the opposite effect of making you disappear completely
from the rankings! Don't do it!
