Top Ten Search Engines

A study of some web sites and my web site revealed that the
below-mentioned search engines make up the top 10 search engines. Though there is nothing new about this, most of us know that Google and Yahoo! account for the maximum volume of traffic. I wanted to analyze the traffic to get an insight into other not so evident stuff:-

Google
Yahoo
Ask
Bing
Altavista
Lycos
AOL

I did not quite drill down to the ten search engines chiefly because 99% of the search was contributed by the above mentioned search engines.So essentially, it is Google and Yahoo that rules supreme. Google accounting for 70 % of the visits.The balance is largely Yahoo, Ask, and Bing. There are a couple of reasons for this. The majority of people I know Google more than they Yahoo! Yahoo! seems to be more of a destination for current news, social networking, flickr etc.It is popular for searching as well, but somehow not as popular as Google.

Another interesting thing i noticed was the depth and length of visit. Yahoo! sent me visitors who stayed on my web site longer and went through many pages.Even though the number of visits were less than Google, the visitors that yahoo!sent me seemed to be more focused and relevant. Believe me, I just scratched the surface, the amount of data that Internet Marketers can use from the data available is amazing!

The other reason is the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, and others. If you are active on the social networking circle, you will find a lot of referrals from these sites.End of the day, it is desirable that you get visits from search engines as well as referrals that way you know you have been successful in promoting your web sites effectively through all the channels.

Finding out which are the top search engines and social networking sites that send you the highest number of visitors is important.It will enable you to focus and optimize your efforts in maximizing traffic from to get more traffic from the search engines and referral sites that have the potential to send relevant traffic your way.

You may also check your search engine ranking on these popular sites and find out how well your site does for your relevant keywords.

Analyzing your search traffic regularly will enable you to achieve results that are in tune with your objective.