Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL - who do you focus your SEO on?

You're trying to position your website to get valuable organic traffic within the search engines. To do so, you would typically think "Hey, we need to target keywords" and while that is pretty accurate, there is something to be aware about.

The major search engines that should probably come to mind, in order, are Google, Yahoo, Bing (otherwise known as MSN/Live) and AOL. These search engines have changed drastically over the past 3 years and while it seems like just a few months ago that Google ruled the search space, it has made a large impact on the web. In fact, here's some information (true as of today)...

Google - gets about 80% of the world's web search traffic

Yahoo - recently announced it will be powered by Bing

Bing - Microsoft's search engine that is striving to get a decent market share, but having a rough time

AOL - actually powered by Google search

...so in essence, it's down to Google and Bing to serve (most likely ) about 95% of the search market. Google should be your #1 target for SEO while your other efforts focused on Bing. The other very small search engines may not be worth your time, but that's your choice. As more social networks work to change the game of search as well, be aware that even more changes will be in place in the coming year. I'll bet you that we'll see a more "live" search results pulling data from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Keep that in mind as SEO continues to evolve.