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October 15, 1997
Which Engines Do I Target
With thousands of search engines on the Web today, it's obviously impossible to achieve good search positions on all your keywords across all these engines. Traditional thinking on the web is "The more engines you submit to, the more traffic you get. This simply isn't true. In reality, there are several critical factors which affect your search engine traffic including:
Your position in the search engine's result list The amount of traffic that search engine gets If you want to maximize your traffic in practical terms, focus on the TOP 8 to 10 engines. These leading engines likely account for 85%-95% of search engine traffic. If you haven't achieved a good position in those key search engines, there's little point in being listed well on the "Joe Blunder Index" that few web users know exist, and even fewer have used. Atlanta-based RelevantKnowledge announced the results of a Study September 24 which monitored and estimated the usage patterns of Web users at home, at work and at college. RelevantKnowledge claims the study is far more accurate than previous studies since it monitored usage in all three demographic areas.
The 20 most accessed sites in order are:
- Yahoo! 14,822,302**
- Microsoft 12,012,202
- Netscape 10,824,802
- America Online 8,251,103
- Infoseek 7,946,467**
- Excite 7,597,988**
- Geocities 7,127,869
- MSN 6,170,267
- Lycos 4,883,459**
- AltaVista 4,657,826**
- CNET 3,976,232
- ZDNet 3,521,996
- Webcrawler 3,233,339**
- RealAudio 2,260,248
- Four11 2,202,307
- Pathfinder 2,129,904
- Hotmail 1,936,296
- ESPN 1,931,467
- Tripod 1,754,563
- Compuserve 1,720,862
** The double asterisks were used to identify the search engines in the top 20 list. It comes as no surprise that Yahoo! continues to rank as the #1 search engine on the Web.
Yahoo! is followed by InfoSeek, Lycos, AltaVista, and WebCrawler in that order. I've heard many discount WebCrawler as no longer worthwhile, but it would appear that they still command the 5th largest audience. You'd be wise to keep all these engines on your priority list. I'd guess that the newer arrival, HotBot, is not far behind in terms of traffic.
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