I've never encouraged a "Google First" or "Google Only" mentality for search marketers to follow. This is where you focus only on Google, figuring the other major search engines don't matter. Instead, I've said that all the search engines are important traffic channels to pursue. Don't forget the search engines beyond Google! But over the past few weeks, I've found myself more and more thinking that if you want to go beyond Google as a search marketer, the other search engines that matter first are the "social media search engines." After them come the other major general purpose search engines like Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.

Yesterday's post from Michael Arrington on TechCrunch traffic sources really drove it home for me. Google's organic traffic -- search driven traffic -- is his top source. After that, it's not Yahoo or Microsoft or Ask sending visitors. No, the leading sources are from social media search engines like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. Heck, even Techmeme out distances the major general purpose search engines (my recent Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator Of Techmeme article covers Techmeme more). Yahoo does show up in 10th place, but that's for My Yahoo feed-driven traffic, not search traffic.

Why's TechCrunch doing so well on Google and not the other major search engines? It could be that TechCrunch is optimized best for Google and missing out on the other major search players. But c'mon. Search marketers know that the major search engines don't have that many differences in how they rank pages. Yes, maybe if you load your URLs up with keywords you might do a bit better at Microsoft Live.com. Perhaps if you do paid inclusion, you might see more traffic flowing from Yahoo. But a page that does well with Google generally should have as good of chance as doing well with the others.

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