Small Business Genius
Search Engines
When the internet was in its infancy, this will definitely tell how old I am, the main search engines were “Web Crawler” and “Alta Vista”. Then Yahoo came along. Now we have Google and Yahoo and it is rare to find anyone who knows the original search engines. Believe it or not they are still around.
There are basically three kinds of search engines: (1) organic search ones, (2) modified organic search ones and (3) paid search. Organic search engines find and position your web sites for free (unless you pay to be submitted to them). Modified organic search engines get their information from organic search engines and position web sites for free. The last one is pretty much self explanatory. Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN are organic search engines.
Since Yahoo and Google comprise over 90% of all the searches out there these are the only ones I will discuss.
Before you decide which search engine you will concentrate your SEO strategy on you must determine what search engine your target market will be using. That is right just because Google is the most used search engine it may not be the best for your site.
Let me explain. If your target market is under the age of 35 Google will be where you need to emphasize your SEO strategy. However if your target market is over 35 Yahoo will be your best search engine. The reason for this is Google has only been around for a short time so the young use it almost exclusively. On the other hand Yahoo has been around since the early 1990’s and that is what older ones use and know.
You cannot concentrate your SEO strategy on one search engine exclusively and expect to get position in the other. That is why none of my web sites ever make it to the number one slot on a search engine but they are in the top five positions of both. So beware of a web site designer that tells you they cannot get you position in both. This is because only an expert SEO can do both.
Note: Previously I illustrated about picking a search engine to optimize for. You still do not want to turn your back on the other search engine so emphasize one but also get position in the other.