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Its Not Just All About Google Anymore
Those webmasters that stick to the old ways and focus entirely onGoogle are missing out on a lot of search traffic these days ifthey are not also well ranked by Yahoo and MSN. For the first few months after Yahoo decided to go their own waywith natural search (and MSN decided to get serious about thesearch business), the search results provided by those two couldonly be described as bizarre. Enough time has now passed thatthe dust has somewhat settled and there are three main (from atraffic standpoint) sites for quality natural searches. The term "natural search" is to distinguish true searches, asopposed to paid advertisements which appear in the search resultsfor many search engines these days. I guess you can't reallyfault the search engine companies from wanting to make some money(actually, BIG money) selling ad space, but the debate over thevirtues of natural search versus paid advertising search issomething that could make up a very thick book and still have noclear resolution...much like debates revolving around religionor politics. Like most people that have been working as online home businessentrepreneurs for a few years, I was strongly conditioned to theneed 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. SinceGoogle was actually the search engine that was serving up theresults for most of the popular search portals, if Google didn'tlook kindly upon your site and rank you well, you would not beranked well for most of the high traffic search sites on theInternet. 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 asearch vehicle, its just that major players like Yahoo andMicrosoft (via MSN) have decided to make a major thrust into thesearch business. Having been firmly conditioned (since shortly after 1998) thatGoogle was the "supreme deity of search engines", I took thehighly publicized search entries of Yahoo and MSN with more thanthe proverbial "grain of salt". Throughout a recent three 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) threeword search term. This situation provided an opportunity tomeasure the current popularity of each of these three searchproviders. 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 90 day period. For the period in question, the search popularity results were as follows: Google: 33% Granted, the above results are for a single search term over a particular 90 day time period, but the results clearly showthat Yahoo and MSN are already important players in the search business. Kirk Bannerman operates his own successful home based businessand also coaches others seeking to start their own home basedbusiness. For more information visit his website at Proven Work At Home Business
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