I never really considered search engines brought much traffic to a website; however now my opinion has begun to be altered. First of all I want to take you back to a few months ago, as I surfed the internet and came across a list of the most used search engines, putting Yahoo at the top.

I remember speaking to a college about it once I had found this interesting information. What's this, its crazy? Everyone knows that Google is the most used search engine out there so why is Yahoo at the top? We left it there not really knowing where the statistics came from and went on with her lives.

Later this year I established a new website on a host offering CPanel, which I had never used before but instantly liked when I began using it. Traditionally I had used different methods of tracking how popular my websites where such as 3rd party stats but as I had server logs and stats on CPanel I began using Webalizer as I had seen it before.

A month or two later though I decided I needed a bit more detailed information and going through the different stats packages available from CPanel I came across Awstats which I have previously discarded but which now seemed to offer detailed and very comprehensive statistics.

One of which was telling me where visitors came from, what search engines some has been referred from and even what server terms they had used. To my surprise, 87.5% of my visitors referred from a search engine had come from Yahoo with only 8.3% coming from Google.

This taught me two lessons. The first was that Yahoo could well me more used than Google, after all Google does now supply some of Yahoo's results so they would be just as good as Google and Yahoo is so well established. That was just side information though; the second and most important lesson was that traffic does actually come from search engines.

People often say that search engine traffic is very targeted although this I am still sceptical on as none of my visitors signed up for my newsletter but never the less traffic has come from the search engines. So maybe getting a better search engine ranking would be worth it all.