Optimizing a website for search: Google vs. Yahoo! and MSN

When I think SEO, I think of Google. Why? Is it because Google’s PageRank system determines better websites? Is it because Google’s advertising options are superior? It’s as simple as this: Google gets better results than any other search engine.

The major search engines often don’t agree

Optimizing websites for search is frustrating sometimes. The biggest search engines are Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. The frustrating part of optimization is the variation between the search engines. The variations in ranking can be huge. I will use Katz Web Design’s ranking information to show some examples:

So you see, there’s a crazy variation between the search engines that can be frustrating. My statistics show, however, that even a bad ranking in Google is better than a good ranking on any other search engine.

Ranking Update:

Since I wrote this post, my site has come up significantly in search results for the terms listed. As a result, the disparity of the results is much less than it had been. Here are the stats as of November 8, 2008:

92% of my organic keyword search traffic comes from Google

A vast majority of my traffic to my website comes from Google. What about my some of my clients?

These clients have similar ranking placement on Google, MSN, and Yahoo! for many of their keywords. You can see that even so, Google still sends an average of 69.4% more visitors to these websites. Optimizing for other search engines doesn’t have the same return on investment as optimizing for Google does. Google remains king.

What’s your experience with optimizing for various keywords across the search engines?