Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, Altavista, Lycos, Ask, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile SEO
Even among them Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the most used search engines and link directories and the remaining derive information from these.There was a time when Yahoo!, and to a great extent Altavista used to rule the roost, but with the advent of Google the search engine game was totally altered. Now the entire world seems to be using only Google and no other search engines. Even Yahoo! -- the granddaddy of portals and searching -- got far left behind in a matter of just a couple of years. Personally I believe once you have covered Google and Yahoo! you have covered 70% of the search engines scene, but then why lose the remaining 30%? Who knows if your entire business may generate from the remaining 30%. For instance there are some great MSN Live fans who would never use another search engine.Optimizing your website for Google and Yahoo! optimizes it for almost all search engines and online directories such as Altavista, Lycos, Ask and Dogpile. Among these Ask Jeeves is still considered among the best by some searchers for the purpose of research and technical information but still very few people use it. Lycos and Dogpile used to be big names around six or seven years ago but people hardly know them now but still some people are used to using them and you can easily make out what "some people" on the Internet can mean -- millions of them.Hence it is better not to focus on just one or two search engines. In one of my previous posts I mentioned creating standards compliant web designs; standards compliant web designs in themselves SEO your website for many search engines without you having to take some extra steps. Different search engines use their own factors and parameters to evaluate search engine rankings but there is not much difference. For instance some search engines are still using the Meta tags like "keywords" and "descriptions" but Google has stopped taking them into consideration; it focuses more on what sort of content you have on your website and how you have arranged that content. Google and many other search engines attach lots of importance to page titles and there are very few exceptions to it.Then there are some HTML tags that are considered to be very important by many search engines; for instance header tags and some formatting tags.Although it is better to rank well among all major search engines, if you can SEO your website for Google, Yahoo! and MSN you have covered practically all search engines. Still there are smaller search engines and there are bigger search engines. It is easier to obtain a good ranking in MSN or Altavista so you should start your ranking effort with these search engines so that while you are spending your time optimizing for Google and Yahoo! at least you should start getting some traffic. And once you are listed in smaller search engines it is easier to get indexed by the bigger ones.

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