It is a fact that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is losing the browser market share. According to the latest Top Browser Share Trend by NetMarketShare.com, IE market share dropped from 60.65% in March 2010 to 56% in Jan 2011 and Firefox dropped from 25.52% to 22.75% in the same period. IE and Firefox losses was Chrome and Safari gains!

My Own Website says Firefox is Number 1

However, according to Google Analytics data of a 1-month old travel guide website, the market share for all the four browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safar and Chrome was between 20.91% to 30.49%. From above table, you can that more people are using Firefox than IE which attracted only 24.56%, far lesser than the 56% reported by NetMarketShare.

I was surprised to see the result of the browser market share on the new website. And the result has proven that cross-browser compatibility should a requirement for every website development and is more important than 1 year ago.

More People are Using Firefox, Chrome and Safari

Because this is a brand new website, the main traffic source was from Facebook. Also, most of the visitors are from Singapore, Southeast Asia and India.

Now, does it mean more people are using Firefox, Chrome and Safari to log on to Facebook?

And people who started to use Facebook in the past 12 months prefered to use non-IE browsers because they are more IT-savvy?

Have you made your web design compatible to all the top four web browsers listed in the table above?

SEO as most people know of, i.e. Dumb SEO which gets your web page into top ranking Google search engine results page, is DEAD. And many SEO specialists who know nothing more than ranking will go out of business.

Here’s why:

• Google implemented Personalized Search for everyone.
• Facebook directs more online users than Google as reported in San Francisco Chronicle on Feb 15, 2010.

And if you have been following this blog, you would have read about my post on Smart SEO is Not just about #1 Ranking on 29 November 2008. Ultimately, you are optimizing the conversion of your web pages.

Time to see beyond SEO for Google

Even when Facebook was in its infancy back in 2007, I urged businesses to make themselves visible on social networks in the article “Time to see beyond SEO for Google” published on ZDNet Asia.

Conversion Rules

A website’s KPI should not be measured by the number of visitors alone. More traffic doesn’t always means more money, otherwise Facebook should be making more money than Google by now.

There is a great dollar difference between general traffic and targeted traffic.

Marketers must know how to define the most wanted response on each web page and measure that number. Use Smart SEO to help you to get your most wanted response and improve your bottom line.