This is the last post on international SEO and looks at the different search engines which may be relevant to us depending on where geographically we may want traffic from.
We can go a long way with Google of course with its worldwide dominant position – however there are certain places in the world where Google has small market share.
Even in the US Bing and Yahoo have a 30% market share between them – and 30% of 350 million people is a big number – see below…..
This is a really useful tool – http://gs.statcounter.com/ – just select search engine and the region you are interested in – as below – and the market share information will be revealed…
So try using this with the regions you are interested in. The question then arises what do you do about it. Well you need of course to ensure you are visible to those search engines so you need to submit to them if you are not already there.
You are most probably already in the Yahoo and Bing indices since these work the same way as Google and follow links. Use the ‘site’ command to confirm – eg
There are many international engines though that wont know you exist unless you submit to them. The good new is they are all easy to submit to once you know about them – they all have either a ‘add url’ or a ‘add site’ tab on their homepages. See the example below – this is Arabo.com a top search engine/directory in Egypt…..
Incidentally this is from another tool which gives you top engines/directories in different parts of the world – http://www.searchenginecolossus.com
Another couple of engines which may be useful are www.baidu.com and www.yandex.com. These are the top engines in China and Russia respectively with very high market share.
Yandex have a very friendly term that speak English and are more than happy to help you set up a ‘pay per click‘ campaign with them!
Of course most of these search engines wont be of any value unless you have translated pages to feed them and that was the subject of our post last week – SEO Refinements and Translation Options
