I recently read an article from CNet titled "
Google snatches search share from rivals ". The only surprising fact was the drop in total searches.
Google has had a runaway lead in the search engine wars for quite awhile and this lead seems to grow each month.
What amazes me from an SEO viewpoint is how many webmasters are jumping on the ever changing Google bandwagon and completely ignoring the other search engines because their share of the market is dropping.
If most of your competitors are optimizing for Google, don't you think that opens the door for you to get ranked higher on Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search or Ask?
Let's put it this way and say you are in the weight loss niche where the estimated daily search volume is about 201,000 and a huge number of webmasters actively optimizing for that term. I don't know about you but I think that's a lot of competition.
MSN only has about 8.3 percent of the search volume of Google which, to me, means their search volume for the term weight loss might be around 16,700 per day and I'm guessing the number of webmasters actively adding content optimized for this search engine is decreasing.
Would you prefer to optimize for a search engine with a growing base of competitors or a shrinking base of competitors?
I prefer fishing in a shrinking pond with fewer fishermen. This means less frequently used search engines may be easier to dominate for your chosen niche.
In Google, you might need to dig down to find keyword phrases that are 3-6 words long in order to get your competitors down to an acceptable level.
I've searched a few of the other search engines and have found that it's easier to find acceptable competition levels with fewer words.
I'm also discovering that it is MUCH easier to get my backlink generation efforts acknowledged by MSN and Yahoo.
Search Engine Share Shuffle 
