Im in a travel/transportation business. I need to reach more of the UK market. What are the HOT search engines in UK? What do UK people use the most for searches when looking for business or US businesses? How to reach most of them?

I'm already doing a little bit of Yahoo UK pay per click. Its working pretty good. WHat else is there?

Mark

What are the HOT search engines in UK?

Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Anything else dwarfs into insignificance. Why not use Adwords to target the UK ? Instant UK traffic.

If you are looking at the UK as a long term market then you might as well set up a .co.uk site as well.

Chris

depending on your target audience Ask can be quite good

I have set up adwords ....I assume it goes to uk automatically?? Doesnt it? Or do I have to set up a special account for UK like with Yahoo/Overture?

Also, isnt ask jeves covered by yahoo/overture? If its not, then how do you sign up with them?

Mark

What are the HOT search engines in UK?
I seem to recall at the SES London "Meet the Crawlers" session, the Google engineer present claimed that Google dominated 70% of UK search.

For more information on how to optimise for a targeted UK market, this thread should be of help:
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=6286

You don't need to set up a special Adwords account for the UK. You just need to choose the countries that you wish to target when you set up your campaigns. If you are setting up Adwords campaigns and not doing this then you are potentially wasting a LOT of money !

You can narrow it down within the UK as well. For example, I've got products that I can only get delivered to England and Wales, so I just select them when I set up the campaigns.

Chris

doktorek: You may have covered some of this already but here are a few basic things you can do.

1. Find out all the keywords that people are searched on to locate your products and services and make sure your site is optimized for them. On-page and off-page. Don't just target all the major ones but target the minor ones. Many times high SERP in minor keywords will give you more traffic than average SERP in major keywords.
Keyword minding tools like http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ help.

2. Banner ads on highly releveant sites.

3. Adsence was mentioned.

4. If you are a non-UK firm looking for more UK business you may want to consider doing some targeted pages on a subdomian and hosting the subdomain in the UK. Some people claim that hosting sites in a country will rank better in that country.

I few things that come to mind that may or may not be helpful.

Espotting (Re-branded as Miva) is the first thing that comes to my mind. Haven't heard anything negative bout em so far, you might want to try them.

Hosting in the UK, .co.uk TLD, mention the term UK on your pages, and links to your UK pages from UK directories and portals will all help.

Miva, by the way, is pay-per-click.

The big three are still the bulk of UK searches, but I would also check out Lycos, which is bigger in Europe than in America.