subject: Seo - Should I Optimise For Search Engines Other Than Google? [print this page] Let's Talk META Let's Talk META
You can't talk about on-page SEO without discussing META tags. Meta Tags or Meta Elements are HTML or XHTML code used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
With Google's dominance in the Search Engine stakes a given, clients often ask me why should they bother optimising their websites for the other major Search Engines such as Yahoo!, Bing and Ask Jeeves.
It is true that Google does tend to ignore certain on-page elements in the mark-up (HTML code) such as META data; in particular the keyword meta tag. I regularly see websites that use this tag incorrectly by stuffing 20 plus keywords in it that don't appear in the content on the page. This spamming technique has been used by web designers from the start so it is fully understandable that Google no-longer use it as a search relevancy metric. Consequently, it is actually better not to use it at all than to stuff it full of irrelevant keywords these days.
Incidentally, the best way to use the keyword meta tag is to use 2 or 3 keywords that reflect the theme of any given individual page. Both Yahoo! and Bing both use this tag though there is much debate in the SEO world about this. Absolutely every technique is hotly debated in the SEO industry!
In my experience, including the keyword meta tag when it wasn't previously has produced a significant increase in search performance on Yahoo! and Bing in a relatively short space of time. I'm not saying that it is the sure fire way to rank well in these Search Engines as many other boxes will need to be ticked first.
It's A Numbers Game
So why bother? Lets look at the numbers. As of writing, the Search Engine market share stats for the US are as follows according to HitWise -
Google 71.59%
Yahoo! 14.28%
Bing 9.87%
Ask 2.28%
AOL 1.21%
It's worth mentioning that AOL is powered by Google and Yahoo! is now powered by Microsoft's Bing engine.
Ok so lets have a look at how many searches are performed in a month on the big three Search Engines according to ComScore -
Google 88 billion per month
Yahoo 9.4 billion per month
Bing 4.1 billion per month
We can see that if you ignore Yahoo! and Bing that you are potentially missing a serious amount of traffic - 13.5 billion potential searches per month in fact. I appreciate that this example is somewhat simplistic and it doesn't take into account regional factors.
So I would recommend taking at least Bing into consideration when optimising your web pages for search. That means not skipping on META data and Search Engine Specific site maps. Also, don't rely solely on Google Webmaster Tools either. Both Yahoo! and Bing offer excellent webmaster tool sets which you should get into the habit of using alongside Google's. The amount of extra time it takes definitely justifies the increase in potential traffic and traffic is what its all about.
