But guess what? No one searches for that phrase in significant enough numbers to deliver any traffïc from it! I'm not saying that this was wasted effort, because in the over 1000 pages at WebSite101 we have enough related phrases that the targeted phrase contributes to the rank of hundreds of related phrases. "Open Source Ecommerce" gets huge traffïc for one single page, ranked at # 29 in Yahoo, #7 at MSN and #1 in Google (as of this writing).

But the really interesting thing is that even on phrases that rank equally well across all three major engines, Google delivers referred traffïc at a rate of 65% compared to MSN at less than 1% and Yahoo about 5% of all referred visitor traffïc. In NO case does Yahoo or MSN refer any clickthroughs at higher than 10% of all referred traffïc.

Referred traffïc being visitors that clicked on your link from search results or links. This applies both in single instances for specific keywords and cumulatively for all referred traffïc.

Hear this very clearly - it has nothing to do with ranking! There are dozens of search phrases that visitors have searched on all three of those engines that deliver traffïc to my site that I can't find my own site for in the top 100 results at ANY search engine. In every case, Google delivers more than twice the traffïc for every keyword combination than does MSN or Yahoo!. In many cases, I rank HIGHER on both Yahoo and MSN for many of those phrases, yet Google delivers far more referred traffïc for those phrases ranked higher at MSN and Yahoo! Does that make any sense?