Why Ignore Yahoo!, MSN Live, Or Ask For That Matter?

I’m amazed at how many people get so fixated on seeking high search engine optimization Google rankings that they completely forget about Yahoo!, MSN Live, or Ask.com. Or even one of the thousands of other smaller search engines. I’ve seen healthy traffic come from places like Dogpile or some obscure search engine that I’d never heard of and didn’t exist (and have often wondered how I got listed there in the first place).

Don’t get me wrong, Google will likely be your main source of traffic (if you do your SEO right). But there’s no rational reason to not attempt to get listed and ranked everywhere you can. You can still pick up a good 20% increase in search traffic just by having moderate to high rankings in the next three highest traffic search engines – Yahoo!, MSN Live, and Ask.com.
Search engine marketing and optimization is not an exact science. You can target one search engine and still find yourself listed higher in another. Be vigilant about checking your rankings in all the search engines and if you don’t see your website listed in a certain search engine after awhile, take some time to submit your site to that search engine or find out what it takes to get crawled by its robots. Don’t get so fixated on Google that you forget everything else.