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When choosing the best course of action to follow there’s a bit of common advice called the 80/20 rule. The rule says that roughly 80 percent of your actual business usually comes from just 20 percent of your customers. When looking at the top five search engines in the United States that rule is fairly accurate.

According to ComScore’s ratings for September 2009, of the top five US Search engines, Google commands the vast majority of online searches by US households, businesses and universities. While not quite reaching 80 percent market share, Google did account for 64.9 percent of all searches conducted during the month of September. That’s quite impressive when you consider that only one other US search engine major managed to achieve double digits. That distant second place finisher was Yahoo! with 18.8 percent of the search market.

Despite all the television ads and internet hype surround Microsoft’s Bing search engine, all Microsoft search portals combined achieved just 9.4 percent of the market in September. While that’s better than Microsoft’s historic market share, it is clear that Bing is hardly setting the world on fire. Ask Networks were ranked fourth with a 3.9 percent market share, and AOL took fifth place with just 3 percent of online searches going through their portal.

While designing a website for optimal search engine ranking, designing for one particular site doesn’t not necessarily mean excluding or sub-optimizing for the others. In fact their ranking algorithms do seem to share a number of common elements. There are, though, times when a decision has to be made to choose between a feature known to be favored by one search engine over another. Market share studies like those by ComScore make it abundantly clear that the savvy website owner should choose to optimize for Google whenever a choice is necessary.

It’s the old 80/20 rule in action. In this case, it’s more of a 65/ 20 rule since about 65 percent of searches go through just one of the five major online search entities. In the world of online commerce, having your website rank highly for terms that are related to your products or services means that more potential customers will click through to your website. When they do, you have the opportunity to give them your best sales pitch with the content of your website. If they find your value proposition appealing, chances are they won’t look any further and you’ll have a new customer.

Regardless of your conversion or closing rate, the more potential customers who are exposed to your sales pitch, the higher the number of sales will be, and the more your revenues will grow. Put another way, the more people you ask, the more who will say yes. In business, yes means dollars flowing into your business. Concentrate your efforts where you’ll find the most potential customers. Use all the search engines, but where a choice is needed, concern your efforts with the clear leader.