I am kinda new to seo and don't know if other search engines besides google matter, since I only read only about Google.
Of course they do. Anyone that relies solely on google is asking for their traffic and income to be taken from them. NEVER put all of your "eggs" in one basket
An almost exact same question has already been asked - use that thread - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=435801
Search engines other than Google are becoming less relevant these days. From my experience, if you get No. 1 ranking for the same keyword phrase at Google and Yahoo, Google can bring up to 10x more traffic than Yahoo. So, even if you double your Yahoo traffic, you are only getting about 10% more total traffic. Focus on Google and if you can get good rankings at other search engines, great. If not, as long as you do well at Google, you are in good shape.
Bad long term advice if you ask me. There is nothing wrong with sepnding more time on google since it is likely to bring in the majority of the traffic, but making it your sole focus is going to lead to problems down the road. How many times have you seen threads here on DP where a member complains about losing everything because of a google update? If they had focused some energy on the other search engines out there his overall hit and loss of income would have been far less.
Most webmasters who monitor their traffic do so with the following search engines in descending order of importance. 1. Google 2. Yahoo 3. MSN 4. Ask Actually, their isn't that much between Yahoo and MSN in importance although a lot of people regards Yahoo as a better search engine.
The bigger SE's will give you more traffic if you rank high, but if you can't rank high, try to target alot of the smaller ones.
They matter but not as much. You could just concentrate on google and still score. Im usually listed well Yahoo/MSN without doing anything.
The country you're targetting on also differs. I believe Google has a market share of 95% in The Netherlands, but that it's less in the USA.
Go for the smaller ones first. You may not have the ranking on Google you want, and be you might not be bring in 500k visitors a day. But the more traffic you get, the more people will naturally link to your site. The more people linking to your site, the higher your ranking on the big ones. Think, it may be easier to rank on a smaller engine, but one that still recieves a ton of traffic everyday. A lot of people will be using that as their primary search engine. They will find your site, and may want to link to it in their webpage, or blog or personal website. That's how I see it.
Of course they matter Google is but a piece of the pie and if you want to get full, you better eat the whole pie before everyone else does.
Sure do mate, I tend to target Google moreso than other SE's, however that usually results in my sites getting similar appearances on Yahoo! and MSN. Josh