That is, optimise your website for which of the five? Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask or AOL? Obviously Google has the greater share of search traffic - but the rest combined are more than equal. The problems are: Google is the golden shot, but it’s also the hardest to impress. If it were just a matter of Google or the rest, then ‘the rest’ would be the choice. But each of them are Google wannabees and have different criteria to rank highly. What’s the pecking order and what do they each like? It’s Google followed by Yahoo, MSN (don’t know why - they have bizzarre results), Ask and AOL. Going for gold,.. sorry,… Google…, also has good results with Yahoo - both value external links and good internal structure, wheras MSN, Ask and AOL value factors which it has to be said are sub-optimal - the domain name is a significant factor which favours early domain name speculators and companies with mucho vonga to buy them. It has to be Google. They ‘get it’ and the others don’t. They’re not just ahead - they’re way ahead - so far in the distance that the others just won’t reach them easily - and not in the forseaable future.
Sound weird huh? What? If I make site (particularly front page) changes - will my website search engine optimisation be positively affected? In SEO, I was never of that persuasion - indeed I always felt that it was unfair that old sites with an early start appeared to have an unfair advantage when people unwittingly linked to them after a trivial request and Google unwittingly compounding the advantage by favouring aged links. If it’s true that changes please God - sorry, I mean Google, then it would be an accurate means of ranking among the thousands (some say tens of thousands) of factors.
One of our clients are chess sets retailers. Having ranked at #1 for ‘chess sets’, ‘chess set’ and a good number of other related phrases (largely through our use of RSS as an SEO tool), ranking at #1 for ‘chess computers‘ became even more important than for ‘chess sets’ since it is a market where people will largely seize the first result they have for a chess computer that fits their requirement. Lower priced units will have sales through some subsequent searches, but our client didn’t want to compete on price - needing healthy margins, and so would realise few sales if they were both lower than the first result and higher priced. The genre is fiercely competitive. Making regular site changes appeared to be the factor that meant #1 or #2 and lower. Every time the Google bot visited - if it saw changes the site was returned to #1, if not it was relegated or retained at #2 or #3. Any ideas?