Search Engine Optimisation Tips (Back to Introduction)

Tip 7. Concentrate on the main search engines

Yes, there are 1000s of search engines out there. No, there are not 1000s of search engines out there that are worthy of your attention. In fact there are very few resources that you need to worry about. We only worry about getting into the following:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Ask Jeeves
• MSN
• Lycos
• Altavista

But what about AOL, Netscape and Freeserve I here you ask? Don't worry we haven't forgotten about them. The most important point is that if you are doing well in the ones we have listed, you will also be doing well in many others that we haven't listed because they all use surprisingly few data sources. Therefore, if you are in these key resources, you will automatically appear in the others.

The second point is that the sites listed above will produce an amazingly disproportionate amount of your traffic. Typically the 15th most important search engine in terms of traffic generation will produce less than 0.01% of the traffic of the most important site (usually Google by the way).