I read this forums for a while ( am a member for over a year already ) so I know the general opinion of some people that I shouldnt rely on one search engine. They often said that in comments where people complaint that after an algo change they were nowhere to be found. some focus more on MSN and Yahoo as well, but I dont. I do focus on off-engine traffic, thats one of the reasons why I crosslink all my sites, I know one-ways are probably better SE wise, but my own websites give relevant visitors so I crosslink a lot! Still when I aim for a search engine I ALWAYS aim for Google. In the Netherlands Google has a market share of 85%. Its not like I CAN aim for anything else. Holland only has like 10million searchers, and 85% go by Google, so its not really interesting to aim for anything else. I know Google changes algo, and that my competition changes. Thats why I have been flexible and changing my website a lot. But always only to keep aiming for Google. If Google would drop me, I would lose 85% of fresh traffic. Is that really bad? Or is staying flexible, and not focussing on 1 page or keyword, but on 100s of pages with each their own keyword, fine? I have 2 websites with PR6, and all others are usually PR5. So I could stay competitive right?
I got 92% of my search engine traffic from google - june 2005.(on my main site) Google is the only search engine I really care about, its nice to rank well for the others (and when you rank well for google you will rank well for a few others most likely too), but google is the one I would aim for.
Optimizing for Google means links, links, and links. Links also help all the other SE's. For the rest it’s content, content, and content with Bold and italic words thrown in from time to time. If you can score with G you should dominate Y and MSN.
If Google would drop me, I would lose 85% of fresh traffic. Is that really bad? Or is staying flexible, and not focussing on 1 page or keyword, but on 100s of pages with each their own keyword, fine? Do you only optimize one page?
I think that I've managed this quite well. Being new to SEO I besically designed my site. After it was complete I started to learn SEO tricks (the good ones not black hat) and made changes to my page. My main site is stuck well back at position 360 > on google yet I can still pull in 200 visitors to my site. If/when I get released from the sandbox I would hope this will go up a fair bit, but at the moment I'm quite happy with 200 poeple a day on the site, it has adsense on and makes a little money but this is not the reason why the site was made, it's just an advantage. I would say focusing on 1 SE is not a great idea as google can drop a site for any reason, personally I would say just optimize your site the best you can. Least it should cover you for all SE's. JP 2p
If your target audience only uses one search engine then I think you should target that search engine.