As far as sending you website traffic, Google is definitely king.  That doesn’t mean, however, that you should ignore all of the other search engines.  As a matter of fact, being listed well in the minor search engines can also send you a lot of traffic that will work well towards making your business profitable.  Some of the search engines may actually be able to send you better qualified traffic than even Google can.  It all really depends on the demographics of those that end up on your website.  Let’s take a look at the other search engines and see what they can do for you.

A long time before Google ever even came onto the scene there was Yahoo.  This was more of a directory that a search engine whenever they first started out.  Even after they began to use Inktomi to run their search engine results, they still were struggling to offer quality to those that were actually searching for something on their website.  Throughout all of this time, their main thrust was toward their directory which was a human edited.  Eventually, Google came onto the scene and they had a fairly decent index as far as search engines are concerned.  For quite some time, they also were the search engine that drove the results which Yahoo displayed.  Eventually, Yahoo stopped using Google for their search engine results and switch back to something that was similar to Inktomi

Even though Yahoo is placing a distant second to Google’s traffic, they can still drive quite a lot of people to your website if you are positioned well.  The problem with this is it can be very difficult to rise in Yahoo’s rankings rather quickly.  They seem to have slowed down after everybody was doing the blog and ping scenario to death.  You can still get decent rankings in Yahoo, however, simply by getting plenty of decent links into your website.  You may also be able to rank better if you pay for a listing in their directory.

MSN comes in a distant third as far as search engine traffic is concerned.  Still, you are able to get some very qualified visitors from the search engine if you can rank well for competitive keyword phrases.  It seems that those who come from MSN are more likely to buy or take some other action than those that are visiting from Google or Yahoo.  The reason why this may be the case is because those that are coming from the larger search engines tend to be a little bit more technically savvy than those coming from MSN.

The next time that you are stressing over your Google rankings, take a look at how well you’re doing on the other search engines.  Put a little bit of work into it and you will begin to reap the rewards of good listings outside of the Google empire.

Tags: google, minor search engines, search engine results, search engine traffic

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 8:41 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.