Puffbox

Further evidence of the power of search engines – and why you should be concentrating on search engine optimisation any time you build a site, or write an article. Heather at Hitwise reveals that Google now has a 78% market share in UK searching… and that figure is rising, up 9% on last year. (Yahoo, MSN and Ask don’t make it beyond a single digit.)

But even more interesting, she notes that 35-40% of all traffic to sites classified by Hitwise as ‘Travel Agencies, Appliances & Electronics and Insurance’ – all big players when it comes to e-commerce – comes from search engines. And yes, the trend here is upwards too. ‘In the week to 21st October 2006,’ she writes, ‘Travel Agencies received 39% of their upstream visits from search engines, up 7% in the past six months. For such an established category, that is a huge gain.’

In other words – people are becoming ever more reliant on search engines, and more specifically on Google, to get what they want from the internet. If you’re running a website, and you aren’t giving serious thought to your placement on Google, and how you can improve it – consider yourself warned.