Are you forgetting the little guys?

Google's recent changes have left a lot of people in a difficult situation. This seems to be especially true among article (directory) marketers and others who use large amounts of aggregate data. However, as I was conducting my research for some keywords I am looking at, I was reminded time and again that Google is not the only game in town. Granted, it is the biggest and as such, we need to be aware of what they are doing and concentrating at least some of our efforts there.

That being said, it pays to remember that there are other search engines out there as well. Yahoo and Bing have been working together and although it may be a begrudging compromise on behalf of their respective companies, it does have a direct impact on all of us. As an example, for one particular keyword I was researching, Yahoo/Bing show six searches for every one search on Google. That was about the biggest variant I found but it did lead me to believe that once again, we need to keep all of our options open.

Do not focus solely on Google when it comes to keywords and searches

Make certain that SEM and off-site SEO is also targeting the other search engines. Google is good but again, in some cases, you are going to get more traffic from the "other guys".

Make certain your sitemaps (which are often overlooked by many IM "professionals" are in the proper formats for Google, Yahoo and Bing. Bing and Yahoo both use a text format sometimes zipped and sometimes not ... (Personally, I use Softplus GSite Crawler to make my Sitemaps ... it is free and effective)

Make sure you remember to use favicons not only for appearance sake, but because all of the missing icons will show up to the SE as a 404 error and will decrease your position in the SERP

To truly give your site the appearance of Organic Growth, why not try actually using wholly organic methods? It is cheap to get someone to leave real, relevant comments on blogs and forums. Backlinks are readily attainable through many different methods and not just from article directories or other similar types of link farms. These days, it is easier than ever to keep your growth natural and that way, whether they are the biggest or not, you can still avoid the wrath of Google AND get more traffic to your site from all of the search engines.

Just some random thoughts as I was working and I hope it actually does help someone here to avoid missing out on what could be a very large portion of the online pie!

Thanks