Search engine optimization is an important part of building an effective website, but you need to know who you are aiming for – so what are the major search engines for SEO?

In order to learn the answer to what are the major search engines for SEO, you just have to look at the most popular search engines that are in use today. If you go back even just five years, there were many more search engines using their own programs to obtain information about new websites and content. Today, there are really only a few major search engines, while other smaller engines feed off of the same results from bigger engines – just with a different front end.

The biggest and most popular search engine – and the one that many other engines aspire to be – is Google. This company, which also has many other Internet properties like Gmail, Adsense, and Blogger, is a huge part of Internet culture. The search engine used by Google often defines how other engines view web pages – and Google has even developed its own system of ranking web pages and placing them on results pages in relation to other sites. When most people are talking about SEO, they are talking about making sure their site is search engine friendly for Google.

While Google has nearly 50% of the market share for search engine use, the next closest competitor has only about half of that. Yahoo is a popular search engine, and the company behind Yahoo also has many other properties like Yahoo Mail, as well as many commercial and paid sites, even Yahoo Stores. While Yahoo has branched out far beyond the search engine arena, some people still use Yahoo exclusively as their search engine of choice. This means that if you want to make sure your site is seen by the most people, you will SEO for Yahoo as well.

Given its monstrous status in the world of software, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft is a bit of a guppy in the world of search engines. It comes in as a weak number 3 in the search engine wars. In fact combining all the traffic Yahoo and MSN control would still equate to less than what Google has.

A final search engine, among the many smaller engines, is Ask.com. This search engine, formerly called Ask Jeeves, has its own crawlers and results. A different way of showing the results on the SERP (search engine results page) has drawn in some users, as has the different way of “asking” for the sites you are looking for. With less than 5% of the market (the same as many other smaller search engines) it is not as important to make sure you are optimized for Ask.com

What are the major search engines for SEO? Well, the most important search engine of all is Google, so as long as you make sure that you have made your site search engine optimized for this engine, you will be sure to get most of the Web to see your site.