I have read through millions of forum and blog posts and noticed a similar encounter with other webmasters all over the world. Many of us are focusing so much attention on performing well for Google's SERPs, that we have long forgotten about Yahoo!, ASK and etc. Google is just representing one of the biggest search engines in the world, there are so many more that are also being used around the world. Not everyone preferred Google and many business man i met chose Yahoo! over Google because Yahoo! present news headlines, finance news and etc which is suitable for business owners. Although Google is by far the strongest and biggest search engine, webmasters must take into account regarding their target audiences. Who are they and which search engine do they preferred? Are you selling fashion wear, mobile phones, trendy technologies? If so, your target audience would definitely be youngsters or mid-aged audiences with a mid-range incomes and their preferred search engines would be Google. Same rule applies for other online businesses around the world. You do not simply want to rank well in Google just because everyone out there seem to be crazy about Google. Type your keyword in Yahoo! and see if you are performing equally well. The answer may be No You Are Not. It is not too late. Find out your niche, target audiences and their preferred search engine. SEO your website towards them not Google. Btw, this article is written by Rif Chia which is me and guys here do not have distribution rights. If you like my articles, you can read more at my Ultimate Web Book
You know, I happen to agree with you. It's just the Web developer in me I guess. For years I used to tell people not to code for one browser (guess which one) and hack for another (again, guess which one). I advocated a browser-agnostic approach to Web development, which is now thankfully starting to take off (especially at SitePoint). Now I'm seeing the same thing with Google, and once again I'm taking the agnostic approach - don't optimize for one search engine and pray the others notice you. Just build a great Web site with quality relevant content that people will want to use and link to - nature will take care of the rest.
I have strong web programming background too and agreed with the fact that many coded their sites for Firefox nowadays and found out that IE, Opera or Safari does not really display their site properly. That are lots of such examples happening everyday and even i for a start did that but managed to solve the problems with minimum javascript and maximum css
I have seen through monthly and yearly reports on the search volumes of different search engines. Google does around 50% and the rest is allocated to other engines. But like i have mentioned above, it really depends on your target audiences and their preferences towards search engines. A good example to highlight this problem would be comparing it to browsers --> You may love to use firefox but others may use opera, safari or even IE. Look at your audiences... You may even create a poll system on your homepage getting votes whether you visitor uses Google or other engines.
Dan Schulz said it all. Just make a great site with great content and optimize the whole thing. Use correct headers and titles, and leave the rest to nature.
Good content and optimization is a must. But at times, we do need to work a bit harder to get high ranking. Nature might just put you on the second page but with constant effort, you can go to the top. Everyday SEO, an hour a day.
Google is providing 60% of total traffic to my site so it would be Obvious for me to put my effort towards google. Off course I am getting some traffic from other search engines but they are not so worth to put all my effort towards them. Moreover if you get good rankings in google you would manage to get few good rankings in other search engines too. That is what I have experienced.
As long as the monopoly of google continues, the site owners tend to be more googlecentric as it provides more traffic and in turn money (that is what everybody wants! ). When some alternative search engines powerful enough to tackle google arrives, then people would definitely have interest in it Till such times, the present trend will continue. Hope for the best
Yahoo or MSN really provide a fraction of the traffic from Google, so there's no way known i'll go out of my way to especially optimize for another engine. However the methods i use do tend to rank well in all engines, i actually started out optimizing for AltaVista then Yahoo. For example, i'm #3 on Yahoo for "SEO Company" and it provides virtually nothing. Even when i was #1 same story, actually i get more page views from Google cache or my DP signature. A few weeks back when i was in the top 3 spots for "SEO Company" on Google, Yahoo and MSN i would of happily knocked my Yahoo/MSN rankings on the head just to move up 1 spot on Google for all my terms.
It is good that google has been providing the highest traffic among other of the rest of the search engines. If you are receiving good traffic from Google, it means your target audiences or potential customers tend to be using Google. Keep it up