For the first few months after Yahoo
decided to go their own way with natural search (and MSN decided to get
serious about the search business), the search results provided by those
two could only be described as bizarre. Enough time has now passed that
the dust has somewhat settled and there are three main (from a traffic
standpoint) sites for quality natural searches.
The term "natural search" is to distinguish true searches, as opposed to
paid advertisements which appear in the search results for many search
engines these days. I guess you can't really fault the search engine
companies from wanting to make some money (actually, BIG money) selling
ad space, but the debate over the virtues of natural search versus paid
advertising search is something that could take up a very large book and
still have no clear resolution...much like arguments revolving around
religion or politics.
Like most people that have been working as online home business
entrepreneurs for a few years, I was strongly conditioned to the need to
"feed the 800 pound gorilla" of the search engine world. Basically, "if
Google didn't love you", it was very difficult to get any meaningful
natural search traffic to your website. Since Google was actually the
search engine that was serving up the results for most of the popular
search portals, if Google didn't look kindly upon your site and rank you
well, you would not be ranked well for most of the high traffic search
sites on the Internet.
However, the search landscape changed dramatically early in 2004 and
things have been very fluid and interesting since that time. Its not
that Google has stumbled, or become ineffective as a search vehicle, its
just that major players like Yahoo and Microsoft (via MSN) have decided
to make a major thrust into the search business.
Having been firmly conditioned (since shortly after 1998) that Google
was the "supreme deity of search engines", I took the highly publicized
search entries of Yahoo and MSN with more than the proverbial "grain of
salt".
Throughout a very recent two month period, one of my websites occupied
the #5 position on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for a very popular and
important (at least in my line of business) three word search term. This
situation provided an opportunity to measure the current popularity of
each of these three search providers.
If asked "before the fact", I would have guessed that Google would still
be the overwhelming #1 search choice and that Yahoo and MSN would be
distant #2 and #3 choices. Therefore, I was somewhat surprised by the
results that were tabulated during this recent 60 day period.
For the period in question, the search popularity results were as
follows:
Google: 34%
Yahoo: 31%
MSN: 20%
All others: 15%
Granted, the above results are for a single search term over a
particular 60 day time period, but the results clearly show that Yahoo
and MSN are already important players in the search business.
Webmasters that stick to the old ways and focus entirely on Google are
missing out on a lot of search traffic these days if they are not also
well ranked by Yahoo and MSN.
Kirk Bannerman operates a
successful home based business and coaches others seeking to start their
own home based business. Visit his website at
Legitimate Home Based Business for more
details.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/
