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As Yahoo! transfers its search technology to Microsoft’s Bing platform, if my prediction of brand death for Yahoo! Search is fulfilled, many Websites will find themselves in the same undesirable position I am heading toward: dependence upon Google for search referral traffic.

Many people in the SEO industry have focused almost exclusively on Google search referral traffic to the detriment of their own and their clients’ interests. I can’t do anything about SEO short-sightedness but those of us who have maintained search referral diversity now face a problem of serious magnitude.

Let me illustrate with some personal data from Xenite.Org.

A year ago Xenite was receiving around 3,000 search visitors per month from Yahoo! search. In years previous Yahoo! used to send as many as 10,000 visitors a month but the traffic declined gradually over time. A couple of years ago Yahoo! was sending about 5-6,000 visitors per month.

Part of the decline was due to stale content on Xenite, a topic I’ve discussed in the past. I just don’t have as much time to create content for my science fiction network as I did 10 years ago. But we do still publish new content every now and then, some of it extremely link-worthy (such as a recent interview with Craig Horner, star of Legend of the Seeker, which drew in thousands of visitors).

So I know that Yahoo!’s declining search market health has been a real factor for many people. Nonetheless, I’ve never abandoned looking to Yahoo! for traffic.

Microsoft search, on the other hand, has always been a minor player for me. A year ago Xenite received about 1400 visitors from Live search. There have been times in the past when we’ve received as many as 1800 visitors a month from Microsoft, but I don’t really remember any higher numbers.

Last month Microsoft’s Bing sent about 2,000 search referrals to Xenite. Yahoo! sent about 2500. There has been virtually no growth in the non-Google search traffic as far as these two competitors are concerned. Microsoft is essentially leeching traffic away from Yahoo!. I expect that trend to continue, perhaps to even accelerate.

Our Google traffic is up over the past year, no doubt due in part to the occasional new content that Xenite continues to publish. Google typically sends us between 18,000 and 20,000 search referrals a month (NOTE: Technically, all these services send much more traffic — I’m just using data from the most popular referral URLs to avoid adding up long lists of referral data).

Although our search referral traffic has not exactly flat-lined, I don’t see much opportunity for growth in either Google or Bing. I mean, to increase search referral traffic we’ll have to add more content and, frankly, I don’t have time for that.

Yahoo! search referral traffic is dying so trying to improve my content’s visibility over there makes no sense, especially since they are now on a 2-year plan to phase out their algorithm. As Bing’s referral traffic grows, Xenite will certainly benefit from the diversity.

But what happens if, for some reason, Bing’s algorithm changes in favor of sites that compete with Xenite.Org? That pretty much leaves me stuck with Google.

You may feel good about relying on Google for your search traffic but I don’t.

Admittedly, search referral traffic only plays a minor role in our traffic building strategies. We get a lot of traffic from other sources. Still, I don’t like getting 85% of my search referral traffic from Google. Time was, back when I had time to focus on my own sites, Google drove about 50% of the search referral traffic.

If Google banned Xenite today we’d still get a lot of traffic but no one wants to take a 15-20% hit.

So what to do?

The only really viable search engine out there besides Google and Bing is now Ask. I haven’t tried to optimize for Ask in ages. We rank well at Ask but we don’t get much traffic from Ask.

Search optimization doesn’t just include ranking well in a search result. It also includes building a query space and enhancing a search brand’s visibility.

In other words, through the years, I have often advised people who struggled to match in Google what they were accomplishing with other search engine rankings to market their non-Google search visibility. This is a strategy that works very well, especially for sites that cannot rank in Google at all.

There are ways to promote your Ask search visibility. They can be as simple as telling people to “search Ask.com for Our Brand Name” or as complex as incorporating Ask search into your marketing efforts (keep in mind that Ask is a trademark so you have to be careful about how you refer to it).

Marketing goes well beyond advertising. It includes all your outreach efforts. Every communication between you and your marketplace can include reference to the search engines where you rank well. You can include Ask in those references and also give Ask special prominence in them.

The fact that Ask does a very poor job of marketing itself doesn’t mean no one uses it. Tens of millions of people use Ask search every month. You should make sure your sites are listed in and ranking in Ask. You should also make sure that people know how to find you in Ask.

Your goal should not be to take market share away from Bing for Ask. Your goal should be to increase your visibility to the people who use Ask.

And if you’re not marketing to Microsoft’s search visitors, you need to be doing that, too. I expect my Bing search referral traffic to increase substantially over the next 2 years. You should set a similar expectation for yourself and make sure you don’t do anything to prevent that from happening.

Maybe Google really does control 85% of the search market. I seriously doubt that (most searchers use more than one search engine). It’s easy to optimize for Google if you don’t obsess over links and targeted queries. It seems to be getting easier to optimize for Bing.

If you want to maximize your SEO efforts, then you need to think about ways of cutting inroads into substantial search market audiences you don’t normally reach out to.

Ask is the low-hanging fruit. It will take most of us 6 months to a year to gear up for Ask. In the meantime, we need to be casing the other search services to see who is coming up behind Ask.

Don’t depend on just one search engine. That’s the worst possible SEO philosophy. I’ve been negligent about my own sites but at least I’m still aware of where they get their traffic from. I intend to do something about resetting my search diversity.

What are you going to do for yours?