We all know that Google is the big one (for today, anyway) to work your SEO magic for but should you take the time to optimize for more than one search engine online?
If you search key phrases on Google and on another search engine such as Yahoo you’ll often see rather different results. Some people find that their efforts net great results on one and not such great results on the other.
Different Search Engine, Different Algorithm
Different search engines use different algorithms with their search engine spiders when determining which sites are relevant to various subjects. One search engine might be more apt to look at your header and others might look at your keyword density for articles.Another might take a strong look at whether you have images and meta descriptions and how often your page is updated.
The key is to write good content so that when the visitors come, they’ll want to buy something! If your content is relevant, the search engines will find you and it’s better to get targeted traffic that converts than to get empty volumes of traffic.
In terms of focusing, optimizing for Google is a wise move as it will probably give you the best bang for your time and money. You’ll find that if you optimize for Google and really concentrate on high quality content, you’ll naturally get good results with other top search engines. It’s difficult to optimize for everyone and a tweak might move you higher on the results page on one search engine but could give you a consequence of losing placement on another and that loss could translate to big money for you.
The only way to really optimize for more than one is to design multiple websites and optimize each with seperate techniques specifically for a search engine.
About Sean Rasmussen
Hi Sean,
There are definitely varying results between the search engines. For instance, Yahoo recognizes more of my backlinks than Google does.
I’m starting to realize that I need to concentrate more on writing quality content. Quality content with highly relevant keywords. The more visitors I get to my site, the more the search engines will take notice.
You will get there Jazz.
I didn’t value the other search engine much until I got a comment from someone who found one of my articles on Bing.
Now that’s changed
Hi Sean
I now have an update. Since it was suggested that I shouldn’t discount the other search engines, I have been tracking my rankings in Yahoo ans Bing.
Lately I have been doing some linking which I have neglected in the past.
I checked my rankings yesterday and wow. Not only have I started to get ranking on my primary keywords, which before were no where in site, one of the phrases is #1 in Yahoo. It still not my main phrase but it least I’m now getting somewere.
Good to hear Gee, seems the system is working
I guess if you concentrate on pleasing the search engines you lose the ones who will buy your products in the end – the human readers. So, again, quality content is key. And once that is taken care of we can throw in the goodies for the Search engines. This way I guess I am more protected from changes in the Search Engine preferences as well.
You have hit the nail on the head Renee.
Quality content should be the major factor, from there SEO is important. By targeting the major Search Engine’s I believe that will cover you for most of the remaining one’s. I read recently that Google is continuing to grow its user base – so I am sticking with focusing on Google for now.
Hi Renee,
Recently I’ve started reading a blog where the blogger doesn’t really care about SEO. He focuses only on the content and making it as interesting and informative for his readers as he can.
It’s really interesting and I’m watching it closely. His strategy seems to be working well but his site isn’t monetised yet. It’s going to be interesting to see how he finds customers rather than just readers following his experiment.
Hi Sean
I haven’t had experience with search engines yet so this was a very informative read.
When you were comparing one search engines results with the other, I was surprised that there could be such a contrast.
Once again, high quality content that is relevant to your site is stressed here and of course I would say having the right keywords for SEO.
I will look forward to being able to comment more on this subject when I have more experience.
It seems it is all about the “Bang for the Buck” or time spent and optimising your time or money is the key…I still don’t quiet understand Googles algorithemes or spiders properly but it is on a must do list now…m/
I’m a strong believer of quality content. Of course, you should pull all the other techniques you are learning on SeanSEO from your bag of tricks and put them in play as well.
I haven’t ever paid much attention to satisfying Yahoo et al, just focussed on Google. As Sean says above “You’ll find that if you optimize for Google and really concentrate on high quality content, you’ll naturally get good results with other top search engines.”
Regardless of which search engine uses what, good SEO means you need to maximise the potential of meta data and tags, use images, descriptions, updating and so on along with the quality content and latent semantic indexing techniques for the keywords.
That will cover them all I suspect
I have wondered about this point recently so it is good timing that I have found this post. My attentions for SEO have been purely based on getting rankings on Google – Im not sure how much of the market share of internet searching Google currently has, but the term “I’ll Google that” has become commonplace language.
As an addition to what i wrote last week……I read somewhere, on some blog yesterday that Bing is making a large play to take over from Google………………..that will be interesting. Huge companies stay with us for a long time…..Will Google ever be replaced? I wonder