If you read yesterday’s post, you might recall that Yahoo! Japan was ranked as the tenth most popular web site world wide.  According to ComScore, Yahoo! Japan received more than 46 million monthly visits in August, 2008.  In fact, Yahoo! Japan is worth almost as much as Yahoo! period.

Google is still biting at Yahoo!’s heels in terms of popularity, ranking number one in India and Germany, 14 and 15 on that same list, respectively. Over the past years Google has been slowly catching up to Yahoo!

Until early this week Google and Yahoo! were discussing a partnership, but it seems that the parties may be walking away from the negotiation table according to a Wall Street Journal aticle I read today. It will be interesting to see how  this plays out.

Among the incomprehensible number of web sites out there—have you ever thought about which are the most popular?  I have.  In fact, I did a search on Alexa.  Keep in mind that findings vary from site to site, and from day to day.
With this particular list, I was surprised to learn that Yahoo! is number one and Google is number two.  I often prophesize of the world domination of Google, but apparently my rambling of this takeover is still fiction (stay tuned).
Here’s the List:

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
3. YouTube
4. Windows Live
5. Facebook
6. MSN
7. MySpace
8. Wikipedia
9. Blogger.com
10. Yahoo! Japan

Employing Organic SEO techniques means your site gets listed with the search engines and your audience finds you.  Here’s an SEO tip that every author should be aware of:  Load Time.
Google, specifically, will ding your search ranking if your home page takes too long to load.  So, optimize your images.  Web images and photographs should be no more than 72 ppi (pixels per inch).  If you do not own image-manipulating software like PhotoShop for instance, you can use the tool at this Web Photo Resizer site.   As an example, you can take a 356 KB image and downsize it to 23 KB without losing any perceptible resolution, and it will load much more quickly.