Archive for the ‘search engines’ Category
Advertisers and search engine optimization campaigns are focused on getting the most bang for the buck. To organize your effort, you need to know which search engines have the biggest pieces of the traffic pie.
Subjective Numbers
Ask anyone in the Internet game and they will definitively tell you which search engine is the best. Of course, this often correlates to the actual search engine they use. I once had a person present me with a long winded, yet passionate, diatribe about why AllTheWeb.com was better than Google, MSN and…Yahoo! If I only had a brain, I would surely see that AllTheWeb.com would become the dominant search engine. This I was told with great conviction and more than a few people nodded their heads around us.
Since I was in a particularly bad mood that evening, I hipped the person into the fact that Yahoo provides all the search results on AllTheWeb.com! I even had to pull the site up and show my “teacher” the truth of the matter. So much for making friends!
Many people fall in love with a particular search engine, which is fine. I do it myself. That doesn’t mean the search engine in question is the biggest, baddest or best! Subjective views are, well, subjective. Follow them in lieu of objective facts and you run the risk of making huge mistakes.
Objective Numbers
There are two types of results you can look at when calculating search engine traffic percentages. The first represents the total traffic covered by a search engine across all sites it provides results to. The second, which we cover here, refers to only the percentage of searches actually on the engine itself. For instance, Google provides results for AOL. In these figures, the AOL searches are NOT included in Google’s totals.
For the first half of 2005, the objective numbers were:
1. Google: 47 percent
2. Yahoo: 22 percent
3. MSN: 12 percent
4. AOL: 5 percent
5. Others: 14 percent
Short, sweet and to the point. Google is clearly eating the biggest piece of the pie. If Google buys AOL, it will grow even more. Conversely, if MSN buys AOL, it will move closer to Yahoo.
When it comes to your marketing, Google is clearly the beast you should focus on. It controls more traffic than Yahoo and MSN combined.
Using the internet had gradually become part of our everyday lives, and in many parts of the world internet is used in business, and is even the course of employment in itself. But there’s a part of the internet that we all talk about, but we can often overlook, and that is the humble, but powerful search engine.
Search Engines are something that we all use everyday, and it’s easy to see why, because as the name suggests, they help us find out we’re looking for in the massive, and ever-growing World Wide Web. They have helped people all over the world find the site that they were looking for, without knowing the part or even all of the URL, they have helped reunite people with lost friends and relatives, they’ve helped form new relationships with people and are a constant source of new information, such as breaking news stories around the globe.
For people who have just started using the internet, search engines are a magical map of sorts that helps them find their way in what can be a very hard to navigate technology, and if you;re looking for something really specific there are tips and tricks that will help you find exactly what you’re looking for, as long as it’s online, of course.
The way search works, is they send our special bots, or ‘spiders’, that travel the internet regularly looking for relevant and up to date information on web sites and certain phrases. While a lot of the technical details of this are kept a closely guarded secret by the search engines, as some companies may try to manipulate the search results or ‘SERPS’ in order to give their site the top result, many people find the way that they work absolutely fascinating. And because search can be used for just about everything, many people have found good jobs working in the search industry through them, such as working for the engines directly, or working in another search related discipline, such as search engine optimisation which is also known as SEO, or discipline of SEO, such as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, SEO web design and content creation, such as copywriting.
There are a number of search engines available, but one of the most popular is Google, which was established in 1998, and quickly became one of the world’s most recognisable search engines, so much so that many people refer to ‘Googling’ instead of searching, regardless of the search engine that they use. Google and other search engines, such as Bing, are constantly updating their algorithms or search processes in order to bring users the most up-to-date and relevant information possible, and as the industry is still growing, who knows what they will be able to do in five years time?
Search engines are a fantastic creation, so don’t take them for granted, and if you’re really interested in them, perhaps you could get a job in something like SEO or SEO web design?
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is essentially part art and part science. Let me give you my definition of it, and a brief description of how it’s done rather than regurgitating or simply posting someone else’s definition.
Before I go into my definition, I want to make sure that I mention what the search engine’s job is. The search engine’s job is to find the content that most closely matches and is most relevant to what the person sitting at the computer is searching is looking for.
How search engines work, is a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that people are more likely to use one that delivers relevant results over one that delivers that just delivers results. Make sense?
To me, in a nutshell, SEO is making sure that your website or web pages, match as closely as possible what the prospects in your industry/market/niche are searching for whenever your prospect goes to a search engine. The goal, is to have your website show up as high as possible in the search engine results pages, aka serps for your given term.
Who does this kind of work?
An online marketing agency will do this kind of work for you. Some agencies prefer to call themselves Search Engine Optimization firms, but it’s all essentially the same thing.
How is it done?
Step 1 is to perform something called “keyword research.” What keyword research is, is finding out what words people are typing in to search engines whenever they perform a given search.
Google, Bing, Yahoo! search engines among others all gather and release this keyword data in aggregate. We can’t tell what you typed in, but we call tell that the majority of people looking for X typed in Y keyword when performing their search.
The next step then, is to optimize your site for the keywords that people are typing in when they are looking for something related to what you do. This is called “on site optimization” because it’s performed on your site.
What else do you do with the keywords you find?
The next step your online marketing agency will do, is to go “off site” and optimize the links pointing back to your website. If there are no links pointing back to your site, the search engines are not likely to find you anytime soon. Additionally, the links pointing back to your site should also contain your keywords to help the search engines find you.
The currency of the web are things called “inbound links” or IBL. No, not irritable bowel syndrome, although getting proper inbound links has given indigestion to many an SEO specialist, but I digress.
The best links, come from “reputable” referring pages, with a lot of authority, from websites in “good neighborhoods” and contain your keyword in the link text. The worst kind of link, comes from a spammy website, hosted with a bunch of other spammy websites, with spammy links pointing back to your site.
How fast does it work?
Not very fast. Sometimes, you can significantly increase your rankings with some very minor tweaks in a short period of time. However, most sustainable results take time, specially if you’re in a crowded niche or if your site is new or if your site had been spamming before.
If you need traffic now, “pay per click” (PPC) advertising may be an option for you, but SEO principles will still govern over your PPC strategies.