When embarking on building traffic to your website (natural and/or paid) it is important to identify which platform will yield you the most traffic. Below is a screenshot from www.Hitwise.co.uk.

The image above clearly shows that Google.co.uk is the primary search engine with the greatest amount of searches over the other search engines combined (Yahoo, Live, Ask and MSN).  Therefore, if you’re using this data for your SEO actives, it is wise to put your attention on getting the best results on Google UK. Now very often, as a by-product of doing this, what works best for Google can also lead to success on the other engines to. Also, now if you hear about someone who claims they have a number 1 ranking in Yahoo or MSN or in fact are showing off their successes, it is not nearly as impressive as being in the same position in Google.

There are many things here we can drill into and analyse such as focusing our efforts using country code top level domains (CCTLD) such as “.co.uk” rather than a top level domain (TLD) such as “.com” as these tend to rank better in UK searches (“.com” domains can have their preferences set in Webmaster tools to target the UK though) but this will be explored in a future post.