The Importance of Google

So why a special guide just on Google? Aren’t there hundreds, if not thousands, of
search engines out there that need to be worried about? There are many other
search engines and search directories that exist, but Google is the most prominent,
most used, and most important of them all. At the very least, it is the search engine
you should focus your website promotion efforts on first. So let’s discuss why this is
so…

Without a doubt, Google is the largest and most used search engine in the world
today. Google currently indexes over 4.3 billion Web pages (as well as PDF, Word,
Excel and other files), over 880 million images, over 850 million Usenet (newsgroup)
messages, performs more than 200 million searches per day, and has 82 million
unique visitors per month (as of March 2004).

Google also currently provides search results to other search engines and
directories, notably AOL, Netscape, Lycos, CompuServe, Earthlink, and AT&T
Worldnet.

This means a # 1 ranking on Google also mostly likely will land you a # 1 position on
these partner sites as well! I say “likely” because the partner sites tend to blend their
results a little bit so the rankings across the partners may not be exact. To repeat:

a #1 ranking on Google also generally means a #1 ranking on:


AOL
Netscape
Earthlink
CompuServe
Lycos (Sympatico)
iWon.com
GO.com
AT&T Worldnet

With its partners included, Google alone is responsible for powering over 51% of all
search engine traffic to websites.

Clearly, Google is where you need to focus your website promotion efforts. After you
have applied the techniques discussed in this guide, have monitored your results,
and then refined your efforts over several months time, you should start seeing
dramatic results. As an aside, the other major search engines are starting to look for
the same elements as Google. So if you get it right for Google, you have also gotten
it right in general for all the other search engines!