Improving your rank on all search engines

While Google is the undisputed leading search engine worldwide, there are, of course, alternative search engines; the fortunes of the various search engines ebb and flow with Google maintaining a commanding lead. Comscore.com is a well-regarded analyst of search engine metric and reports Google's share of US search queries at about 64%, Yahoo! at about 17%, and Bing/Microsoft at about 12%. The remaining field is made up of a handful of third-tier search engines such as Ask.com, Dogpile.com, and hundreds of smaller search engines.

So how does one rank for all search engines? The answer is easy; optimize for Google. Google's search algorithm is the most advanced, and is certainly the best at detecting disfavored optimization techniques such as keywords stuffing, paid link arrangements, and so on. Furthermore, Google's technology is so dominant that the other search engines imitate most of Google's innovations.

And so, if you rank well for Google, you'll certainly be well-positioned to rank well in the other search engines. Keep in mind, however, that Google is also the most responsive search engine: Google crawls (visits) your site more often and indexes websites faster than the other search engines. So, as you work on optimization, you might see positive changes in Google rankings in a few weeks, whereas the other search engines might take months to respond.