SEO Management

1State of the Art of SEO

1.1. The market share of search engines

Before we talk about search engine optimization (SEO), we must first focus on the market share of search engines around the world. Indeed, in the West and Asia, we are not looking for information on the same engine. In European and English-speaking countries, the most widely used engine is the American Google. In China, on the other hand, Baidu is the most widely used. At the moment, Google and Baidu are the search engines with the highest market share in the world¹.

Figure 1.1. Google and Baidu worldwide market share. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO1.zip

Therefore, for these territories in the world, we must focus on Google and Baidu (and also its national competitors, such as Shenma, Qihoo 360 and Sogou). There are still other search engines for different countries in the world; here is the list:

• – in Russia, there is Yandex, which has a fairly large market share with more than 50%², while Google has less than 45%;
• – in South Korea, there is Naver, which has a market share of 25–30%³ (Google possesses the majority);
• – in Japan, there is Yahoo! Japan, a local search engine based on Bing’s results in Japanese and which has an average⁴ market share of about 30%, depending on the year (Google also has the remaining share of the majority in this case).

Every year, search engines ...