Search engine optimization has been very popular over the last few years, as more and more companies grow aware of the rules governing the Internet market and realize that they need to be noticed on the World Wide Web in order to survive. This is especially valid for one of Europe’s leading Internet markets, the United Kingdom, where the number of web-based businesses is constantly on the rise, the demands of online customers grow, and competition is fierce.

In November 2007, the SEO provider myclicks published website market share rankings of web traffic in the UK. The statistics is based on UK Internet usage, ranked by volume of searches for the four weeks ending on November 30, 2007. The group with the biggest market share is that of search engines, followed by social media sites.

Among search engines, google uk and google together account for 85% of all search engine usage, followed by ask dot com (4%) and yahoo uk (3%). While Google is the unquestioned leader, traditional websites such as yahoo and MSN are falling behind. The reason for this downward trend is that while still using these portals for news and various other things, Internet users now prefer specialized search engines in order to get reliable information and sources. MSN is currently suffering from insufficient impressions and is trying to expand its network. However, the process is very time-consuming and has so far failed to produce favourable results.

The second largest holder of market share according to the survey of myclicks.us is the group of social media sites, which in the UK account for 4,5% of all web traffic. Facebook dot com, Bebo dot com, and Myspace dot com are the biggest players in the UK in this sector, and along with smaller websites are quickly gaining wide popularity. This makes them a very favourable advertising medium. A good example is Microsoft’s deal for part of Facebook dot com, which with its 2% market share in the UK is the leader among UK social media sites. The purchase gave the software giant the opportunity to advertise in the quickly growing network.

The quick development of social media networks has overtaken that of large online stores and web-based e-mail clients, each of which accounts for 4% of UK’s total website traffic. Although they are traditionally low in the chart, traditional news sites like bbc (co.uk) still manage to hold around 2% of all website traffic in the country.

The survey highlights several main trends in user tastes and preferences. The undoubted new phenomenon is social media sites, which for a very short time have managed to overcome some traditional websites, such as online stores and news sites. Another trend is the emergence of clear favorites on the search engine arena. These findings are essential and useful to all types of businesses and especially to web-based ones, which rely solely on SEO approaches to gain popularity and attract customers.