While Google is the leading search engine in the Western Hemisphere, there are, of course, alternative search engines such as Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China. The fortunes of the various search engines ebb and flow, with Google maintaining a commanding lead. Comscore.com is a well-regarded analyst of search engine metrics and reports that in 2014, Google's share of US search queries at about 75 percent, Yahoo at about 10 percent, and Bing/Microsoft at about 10 percent. The remaining field is made up of a handful of 3rd-tier search engines like Ask.com (http://www.ask.com/), Blekko.com (http://blekko.com/), and hundreds of smaller search engines.

So, how does one rank for all search engines? The answer is easy: optimize for Google. Google's search algorithm is the most advanced, and is certainly the best at detecting disfavored optimization techniques such as keywords stuffing, paid link arrangements, and the like. Furthermore, Google's technology is so dominant that the other search engines imitate most of Google's innovations.

And so, if you rank well for Google, you'll certainly be well-positioned to rank well in the other search engines. Keep in mind, however, that Google is also the most responsive search engine. Google crawls (visits) your site more often, and indexes websites faster than the other search engines. So, as you work on optimization, you might see positive changes in Google rankings in a few weeks, whereas the other search engines might take months to respond.