Search Engine Market Share – December 2006

comScore released their December 2006 search engine rankings showing Google’s continued growth:

• Google 47.3%

• Yahoo 28.5%

• Microsoft 10.5%

• Ask 5.4%

• AOL/Time Warner 4.9%

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land looks at the overall changes in search engine market share during the last twelve months, which provides a better picture of what’s really happening. Google is of course the leader. And, the big loser is Microsoft. Surprising, given their emphasis and investment in Live search.

Link Building The Right Way

Building good back-links to your website is a key component of building improved search engine rankings and generating increased targeted traffic. Where do you start? Linking to someone means that you believe in their product or service so much that you are willing to put your own credibility and reputation on the line. This is something you certainly do not want to do without consideration.

How many times have you received a link request obviously created by an automated link application that is both impersonal and often poorly written. What motivation does this provide a serious business owner or webmaster to take action?

When you find a website that interests you and has some something in common with your product, service, philosophy, etc., consider contacting the site owner acknowledging your interest and seeing if it leads to a potential business relationship. If so, a link might be a natural result as well as other business building dividends.

Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide shows you how to do it right in her article, “Link Building As Relationship Building – A Great Example“.

Can Search Engines Index a Website Built in Flash?

I am frequently asked this question and the short answer is NO. Flash is an outstanding application that can engage visitors through sight, sound and motion. But, its dynamic nature prevents search engines from identifying and indexing its content. There are some work-arounds, one being to build in some coding that detects a browser’s capability. If the browser is not Flash capable (search engines are not) then a static version of the page is served. Of course, another approach is to embed Flash into an HTML page.

An article was recently referred to me, written by Jonathan Hochman, entitled, “How To SEO Flash“. It is well written and worth reading if you are considering the use of Flash in your website.