In spite of the fanfare surrounding the launch of Microsoft's search engine Bing and the "lots of news and noise" about Yahoo! in 2009, targeting Google should remain the top priority for search engine marketing in the year ahead, an specialist has said.

Writing on Search Engine Land, Kelly Gillease, managing director of tourism expert Vector, noted Google retains a "commanding" lead over its rivals in terms of market share and concentrating search marketing efforts on its pay per click service Ad Words is therefore likely to yield the best results.

"In the spell of activity around other projects and news, it is always a good idea to remind oneself of that," she said.

Ms Gillease added there is "always more to do" with Ad Words to enhance pay per click marketing, including testing content targeting, creating mobile ads, image ads and video ads, and targeting specific devices, like the iPhone.

According to Efficient Frontier statistics reported by Media Post, Google accounted for 74.5 per cent of spending on internet marketing services in the fourth quarter of 2009.

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