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To truly understand why search
engine positioning is effective, you have to understand how and why
searchers search. This week, we’ll take a look at what goes through
people’s minds when they head for their favorite search portal.
A Few Good Portals
First, you must understand that we’re all creatures of habit, and that’s
especially true when it comes to the Net. While we may visit hundreds or
thousands of sites in a month, we’ll be regular visitors to just a
handful of these. This includes our search portal of choice. The average
searcher will use only one or two search tools regularly. We’ll develop
our favorites and stick to them.
The other fundamental truth is that the vast majority of us use a very
select group of search sites. Survey after survey has shown that over
95% of us use one of 13 major search portals. These are:
Of these,
Yahoo has garnered the lion’s share
of the market. Depending on the survey used, Yahoo has between 30 and
50% of the total search market. That’s right, of all the people
searching in the world right now, somewhere between one third and one
half are doing it at Yahoo. If you took the top 4 engines (Yahoo,
Google,
AltaVista and
Excite) it would add up to over 80%
of all search engine traffic. Does it really matter if you show up on
Bubba’s Big Search Engine? No. Do you need to be in these major engines?
Absolutely.
They’re the Kings of the World
Most engines have regional variations of their search sites that offer
enhanced search capabilities for sites from that area. For instance,
Yahoo.co.uk or
Yahoo.ca allows you to search their
entire index or filter your search to just sites in the United Kingdom
or Canada. The majority of engines pull these regional results from the
same index as their main site. When looking at usage numbers, most users
will head to the dot com version of their search site before they’ll go
to the regional version.
The other important fact to remember when looking at attracting
international visitors is that right now, English is the de facto
language of the Internet. The vast majority of sites are in English and
the same holds true for searches done on search engines. It should be
said, however, that as Internet access reaches more and more people,
there will be a greater demand for foreign language search engines.
Different Engines for Different Folks
Search sites are not all created equal. The sizes of their indexes vary,
the thoroughness of their searching options, and the way they determine
the relevancy of the sites listed. For this reason, you’ll find
different people attracted to different engines. Here’s a quick matching
guide for some of the main engines.
Yahoo: Yahoo appeals to the relative
newcomer to the Net. It’s massive name recognition factor usually
guarantees it will be the first search site the web neophyte will try.
Generally speaking, once the user gets a little more familiar with
searching and tools available, they’ll move on to another tool.
Excite: Excite has developed a
proprietary method that tries to guess what you’re looking for. For this
reason, it’s often used when the searcher is a little vague about which
keywords to use. If you have what you’re looking for firmly in mind and
you want to quickly focus on the most relevant sites, Excite probably
isn’t the search tool for you.
Google: Google is the fastest
growing search site today in terms of usage. Its clean interface and
superior relevancy algorithms are drawing more and more searchers.
Google attracts the power user that is familiar with searching and wants
to find the most relevant site in a hurry.
AltaVista: AltaVista can be
likened to the owner of the world’s biggest bookstore. He knows what
you’re looking for and he knows he has the book in stock but it just may
take him awhile to find it. AltaVista has a huge index and if you’re
comfortable using the advanced search tools, it offers powerful
searching abilities, but at the basic user level, it can be a little
confusing.
Lycos: I hate to say it, but I
believe the Lycos user base is still around just because they don’t
realize there are far better choices out there. The search results are a
complete mishmash of listings from Goto,
Open Directory and
Fast. The number of people using
Lycos has been slipping lower and lower.
Go: Go has had severe growing pains in
the past few years. In it’s prior life, as Infoseek, it was one of the
most popular search tools on the Net. Today, it’s struggling to find a
niche and can’t decide whether it’s a directory or search engine. Some
time ago Go announced they would be moving towards becoming an
entertainment based engine, but other than a recent interface redesign,
not much seems to have changed. Like Lycos, Go’s user base has been
dwindling over the past few years.
MetaCrawlers and Search Tools
Many people, especially long time web users, prefer to use one of the
many tools or sites that search several engines and directories at once.
As a percentage of total searchers, the number of people using these
tools are fairly small (less than 10%) but the ones that do tend to be a
pretty sophisticated bunch. Of the metasearch tools and sites available,
some of the most popular are Dogpile
(site), MetaCrawler (site),
Mamma (site),
Copernic (tool),
WebFerret (tool) and
SearchWolf
(tool). Because these search tools and sites pull their results from the
major search engines, good positions on these engines will result in
more traffic through these sources as well.
Keeping It Simple
Many search engines offer advanced searching capabilities. These tools
allow you to further refine your searches by applying filters or using
Boolean phrases. The addition of quotation marks or putting a Boolean
search together using “and”, “or”, “but not” and other qualifiers can
quickly weed out the non-relevant sites from your search.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of searchers don’t ever make use of
these tools. They go to the main site and quickly type in a few words in
the main query box. For this reason, we always evaluate our client’s
visibility on general phrase matches, not exact phrase matching. This
means that the search engine is searching for all the words in a phrase
if they appear anywhere in the site, even if they’re not necessarily
together in the phrase specified. AltaVista will default to an exact
phrase match if the phrase used is a popular search phrase.
A Few Well Chosen Words
Keyword analysis is a vital part of any search engine positioning
program. It’s very important to spend some time thinking about the words
that searchers might be using to find you.
Don’t be too broad. If you make custom golf clubs, don’t try to optimize
for “golf” or “clubs”. Any potential visitor that would use those words
would soon give up wading through thousands of irrelevant search results
and would narrow their search by using a phrase. What you want to do is
find the right balance between search phrases that are popular and are
specific to your product or service. These are the phrases that will
produce the highly qualified traffic you’re looking for.
For more on choosing keywords, see the
article on our
site.
Top 10, Top 20, Top 30
This next topic is the whole reason there’s a search engine optimization
industry. The fact is, almost no one will go beyond three pages of
results in their quest for a site. Most won’t go beyond the first page
of results. So that’s where you need to be.
That said, is there a huge difference being number 1 or number 6 on that
first page? Generally speaking, no. The majority of searchers will scan
the first page of results to see the site that seems to be most relevant
to their search. For this reason, what’s said in your title and
description is much more important than what position you hold. Yes, a
number one position gives you a slightly higher chance of being clicked
on than a number 4, but a compelling, well-written title and description
will be of far greater value.
Making the Grade – Qualified Visitors
Working to achieve higher search engine rankings is not an easy
business. Other than raising children and going to the bank for a loan,
it may well be the most frustrating experience you undertake in your
lifetime. But the fact remains that the traffic that comes to your site
from a search engine through a relevant keyword search will be the most
relevant traffic you can find. Once the search engine delivers them to
you, it should be an easy step to turn them into a customer. |
SEO