photo credit: Tony Webster

Most of them are pretty worthless: They either nave no PageRank, no traffic or allow no dofollow links (unless you upgrade and pay between $1 and $50). But there are some press release distribution sites that have PageRank, good traffic and allow links that are dofollow.

If a press release service is not syndicated by Google News, it’s plain worthless. I’ve submitted to them just to have some more meat for the story. If I would have only used services that submit to Google, you might have take that fact for granted.

By the way, there is one secret weapon in regards to press release services. It brings you the PR News Wire distribution (at least the online part) for only $350 as opposed to $650 directly. Just give me a call to find out more

Photo Credit: CMJ Stock

How long does it take until you see results? It is very difficult to give a general answer on this. Once I start on a project, you’ll usually see some kind of movement within the first 3 to 4 weeks. But that does not mean much. You will see a handful of visitors and your ranking for your targeted keywords will go from maybe nowhere to number 30 or 40.

A few weeks later,  about 6 to 8 weeks you should see some further climbing up the ranks. Your main keyword or keywords will by now probably be sitting on the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Depending on your market, that can already mean some kind of traffic, but usually it’s just a trickle.

“Since there are only 10 places and many millions of websites you can’t just expect to be lucky enough to appear on the first page for your target keyword and phrases. It takes planning, hard work and a certain amount of expertise. That’s where SEO comes in. Optimizing your website involves work both on and off of the pages. It is important that your site is built to a high standard, all the links must work and the content has to be both keyword rich and relevant.” Via google-pageone.co.uk

After 3 to 6 month, with ongoing search engine optimization work, you should see your main keyword appear on the first page of the results. And another 6 to 8 month later should be rewarded with some solid top rankings. This could mean Google #1, or at least on page 1 and within the  3 to 5.

But all this depends on so many factors, that it is very difficult to give an answer that is true for the majority of the cases. Or to state it different: I have seem sites going from nowhere (just registered) to solid top rankings with several weeks and on other sites it too almost 2 years of solid work to achieve similar results.

So, what do we learn from that? Doing the right things, doing just enough of it and your site will be at or near the top. If you want to get an idea what it takes to achieve excellent results, I suggest to read Google Ranking Factors – SEO Checklist. If you calculate several months and don’t freak out if the phone does not ring off the hook after a week or two, I can work with or for you. If you need miracles over night, go fishing elsewhere (and hope to not get caught with your pants down…).

A leading online competitive intelligence service, Experian Hitwise accounced yesterday that Google accounted for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Nov. 28, 2009. Yahoo! Search received 15.39 percent, Microsoft’s Bing 9.34 percent and Ask.com received 2.65 percent. The remaining 52 search engines that were not explicitly named in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.07 percent of U.S. searches.

If you are interested in up-to-date analysis of online trends, you can visit the Hitwise Research Blog .

This table is not completely correct. The data is obviously a little slanted towards Google. It counts ALL traffic to Google, while it only counts a small portion to Yahoo. But even if that would be compensated, my guess is that Google still get over 50% of the US search traffic.

This picture is by the way completely different for other markets. In Japan for example the word Google is almost unknown. The market leader there is Yahoo, by far. So, if you want to reach somebody in Japan, you would focus your search engine optimization efforts on Yahoo.

There are also markets where basically only Google exists as far as search engines is concerned. One example of this would be France, where Google enjoys a whopping 91% market share.

Google’s market share in France was 91.23% for February 2009. The major search engines that trailed Google were Yahoo (2.43%) and Live Search (2.29%). Source: Google Blog.

For the US market you are, at least for the time being, save if you optimize for Google. The good thing: If you have optimized your web site for Google, you are already very close to a home run on Bing and Yahoo. The differences are not that big anymore.

SEO for Bing differs not that much from Google SEO or Yahoo SEO. Reducing SERP bounces is the most important on page factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), as this factor monitors how good your content is. Or better how good your content matches the “ad”. The search engine listing is nothing more than an ad. If that ad matches what you deliver, you will have happy visitors that turn into customers.