Search Engine Question

[Louis.]

I plan on submitting my company to a few search engines but would like to know firstly which are the most popular. So the question being...

"When you search for something on the internet, which is your preferred search engine ?"

Thanks.

[Plotloss]

In the UK almost 90% of search traffic goes through Google.

Focus on Google and get your listing in Google straight then worry about the minnows.

[anonymous-user]

Google is huge. Put it this way-Google did an update about this time last year, any URL's with a hyphen lost all rankings(our URL then!!), we went DEAD for two weeks, once the issue was sorted we went back to work!!

[slapmatt]

Google, then Yahoo, then MSN.

Your best bet is to create an XML sitemap of your site and then add it to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

The search engine robots will then pick this up and index your pages accordingly.

It's also worth signing up to Google's Webmaster Tools, where you can claim your site and see some interesting Google generated stats. Yahoo also have similar tools in beta version.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the "Add your URL" links on Google etc are next to useless as the backlog is so long. The best way to "invite" a search engine to visit your site is to submit an interesting link to the main social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com, Netscape.com, Reddit.com etc.

Never pay to have your site submitted to search engines. They hate automated submissions and it's a total waste of money.

[anonymous-user]

Re:-XML sitemaps-just make sure all your links/pages are OK-they really don't like "orphaned" pages.

[anonymous-user]

ps, think of which key words people will search for. As s joke i got back at two m8's with a spoof rent boy site They ranked number 1 in google for weeks and got god knows how many hits