Archive for October, 2011
Google search engine is by far the most popular search engine today. If you want to look for something online, your best resort is to use the services of a search. And the most convenient way to do online search is by checking out Google’s search results. Nevertheless, Google is not the only available for you, but it is the benchmark for search engine optimization or SEO, and the underlying reasons are obvious.
When you look for stuff via the Internet, say a used car, you only need to open Google search and there enter relevant keywords. Google will then provide you several pages of search results containing a list of websites on used car. You will then browse each website listed in the search results for the best deal. But typically, you would only pay attention to the first few pages, not to the succeeding pages of search results.
Studies show that 80 percent of online traffic comes from search engines. A large part of that prefers Google over others. Thus, if you are to catch a good percentage of the online market, your best bet is to study how Google ranks websites and lists in search results. It makes use of algorithms to determine how relevant a website is in relation to certain keywords. Search engines send robots to crawl or study each page of a website to determine its relevance.
Website relevance largely depends on content quality. Good quality content means no duplicate content, so beware of plagiarism. Text content is more readable by search engine robots, so always make good descriptions of videos, photos and graphics. Google search engine also looks at inbound links or back links (externally located links that point to the website). It is important that the link partners of the website are of high caliber and high rating.
It is not enough to post a lot of content and to make a lot of back links to the website. Improper website optimization is always tantamount to being penalized by Google and getting a poor online rating. Lower rating means lower chance of being included in search results, which leads to the website becoming less visible and less accessible to online users.
Now you might be wondering why your newly developed website is not ranking the way it should. That is how Google works – rating old domains higher than new ones. This is to prevent people from creating new websites that are only filled with hyperlinks. In the battle of Google search engine optimization, content is king, so continue on developing great content for your new site. It is just a matter of time for your ranking to go up.
Google hates black hat search engine optimization, so never sell links, do not hide texts, and avoid overloading content with keywords. If you want to drive your web ranking up, always follow the guidelines set by Google. Also, it helps to use Google webmaster facilities to ensure you are on the right track.
Online ranking is as dynamic as the world. Do not be confident with the ranking you achieve at one moment, for it can change any time. Always be on the lookout for the changes in Google’s rules on website optimization, so you are guided properly. Remember, when it comes to Google search engine, nothing is permanent, so do not rest on your laurels.
Search Engine Optimization best practices have continued to develop since the dawn of search engines themselves. This evolutionary process constantly progresses, inevitably pushing the owner of a particular web site toward practices that start to sound much like traditional business plans.
Following these best practices should give you with a stable technique of putting up organic traffic towards your website for a long run. These practices can be classified into 4 main categories of activities, namely:
Subject – matter expertise. This implies that you will need to have a superb content. Putting up a big organic traffic flow will not occur unless you have an excellent content. You have to provide something on your website that people would want to read on and link to. In addition to this, you will not be able to close a business deal well unless your page content is viewed as high quality by future business prospects. There are various ways to show your expertise on your web page. First you may have to write articles that are good in quality about your area of expertise. You may also offer great helpful tools that visitors of your page may want to use. Make a peculiar and valuable community on your website. Information architecture. This is defined as the practice of organizing knowledge or data for a particular use. In a broader sense, think of this principle as user-friendly design. Effective information architecture has the following basic elements: (1) Knowledge on how your users perceive about the topic area of your website; (2) a clear and well defined global navigation system, and; (3) control usual UI practices. Technical implementation. This highlights the necessity to learn on how to proper deal with the algorithms adopted by different search engines to obtain the best outcomes. Marketing. This was previously known as link building which refers to marketing and promotion of your website.
In driving up search engine traffic towards your site, there is no doubt that there are a lot of various opportunities that you can explore with the use of strategies which are not in keeping with the terms of services of these search engine companies. You have to perceive these strategies as both a distraction and a risk. It is considered to be a distraction since it will prevent you from concentrating too much from building the trust in your business. This mutual trust could be a lasting asset that you are trying to put up. On the other hand, it is considered as a risk since the traffic that you obtain from these strategies will just go away when the time comes that search engines would be able to cope up with them, or you can even get banned during the worst case scenario.
Keep in mind that you just cannot take for granted the technical requirements of the search engine companies. Getting them right is very important. Do not view this as putting up your site for the search engines, but rather, perceive it as putting up your site for the users, although, being search engine friendly simultaneously.
SEO, or search engine optimization, should be a major concern for any webmaster. Although no traffic source is permanent or completely stable (hence the importance of traffic diversity), SEO is one of the more reliable traffic sources.
Not only is it reliable, but SE traffic can be viewed as being more valuable than other sources due to the fact that there is a certain amount of ethos associated with web pages which have reached the top of the search engines in which people give that page extra credibility just by virtue of its ability to claim that top spot, making it more likely that they’ll trust what we have to say, sign up for our offers, etc.
Given that we’re performing optimization on and off our sites to impress the SEs, it’s worth knowing what is the best search engine of today.
For our purposes, the best search engine is the most popular one which allows us to put our site and content in front of the greatest audience. According to a study, not surprisingly Google is overwhelmingly the favorite and most popular search engine, claiming as much as 72% of the full market share as recent as last year.
Bing doubled their popularity last year from the year before thanks largely in part to their aggressive television marketing campaign, yet Google still hasn’t given up much ground in that time.
For one of my sites personally, over 99% or practically all of my organic search engine traffic in the last month came from Google whereas I experienced trace visitors from Bing, Yahoo, etc. According to that statistic I linked to earlier, I should be receiving somewhere around 72% of my traffic from Google, give or take a dozen percent. But 99% just from Google?
This can be accounted for by 2 reasons.
One, my target demographic and audience uses Google. It’s true that different types of people use different search engines. Google applies to the masses obviously, but it is also the choice search engine for webmasters, people interested in the business of the internet, more tech oriented people, and generally speaking exactly the kinds of people whom would be visiting my site, so that plays a substantial role in that sizable disparity.
Two, I’m not ranking as well in other SEs. I rank well for many of my keywords in Google (thankfully) whereas with the other search engines I don’t crack the top 20 for most of my keywords.
I’ve heard different and oftentimes conflicting things about what it takes to rank well in other search engines, but typically I meet or address every one of those factors on my site.
Generally speaking, the same basic factors and practices SHOULD apply to all search engines as all search engines want the best content to rise to the top, and the basis for measuring the best content should typically stay roughly the same. What DOES differ is how each individual engine chooses to split up the importance of each factor in their algorithms.
Doing a few basic Bing searches for example, very few of the keywords I searched for appeared in the title tag of the top 10 results.
No one knows what exactly goes into the algorithms these engines use to rank sites. This is how search engines remain secretive and consequently successful; if they made that information publicly available, everyone would use that information to take advantage of or con the system and spammy webmasters promoting crap would likely dominate much of the search results.
In doing some Yahoo searches, I found that articles which I had written on article directories like Ezine Articles based on posts from my website were outranking my website. I’m talking several keywords returned my articles well before my site itself, oftentimes on the second or even first page of the SERPs; and this is all without any optimization/link building to those articles.
Now this makes sense, because if you recall earlier this year during Google’s content farm update, Google severely diminished the influence of content farms in terms of link juice and ranking within Google, so while this is something which would NEVER happen in Google after this update, article directories still apparently flourish in the other search engines.
Getting back to the original question of what is the best search engine, one final unintentional observation which I made in using other search engines was that the search results/web pages I received for my keywords were not nearly as relevant or helpful to my searches as they were using Google, and it’s hard to argue with the bottom line.
I know that I’ll rank better in time on other SEs, admittedly this is still a very young site and domain age/authority is a large ranking factor in most search engines. I also believe that the other engines need to look at their own product and could benefit in taking a page or two from Google before continuing to spend millions in television advertising campaigns.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have a soapbox to climb down from.