So many times over the past years, this has happened. An SEO campaign aimed at improving a site’s performance on Google yields unintended (good) results on Live Search (MSN) and Yahoo Search. In fact, on many occasions, the site ranked better for the same keywords on Live and Yahoo than on Google. It’s quite clear that search engines, although different, are quite similar in many ways to other. Google is by far the most popular (about a 60% search share belongs to Google), but both Yahoo and Live Search can bring in significant traffic, some would even say traffic that converts better (due to the demographical structure of their respective user bases).

It occurred to me that companies could do SEO for Google even though ranking well in a particular search niche might be extremely hard to achieve due to the sites that are already occupying top spots, but SEO for these spots and keywords on Google may actually yield top spots on Yahoo and Live Search. Having top spots on these two for identical keywords, for which the competition is simply too strong on Google, can significantly compensate the lack of presence in the top results on it. This is something I noticed through experience, which naturally doesn’t mean it happens as a rule, but it’s definitely something to think about. Aiming at tough search terms on Google, in this case, is a valid effort if it gets you better results on Yahoo and Live. This doesn’t mean it’s easy to get top results on search engines other than Google. Homework still has to be done, and weeks and months of work still have to be invested for long term results.

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