Part IV: Marketing your Website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Overview - SEO Help Files

by Pauline Sugarman

Created July 2004; Revised February 2006

Studies over the past three years confirm that people, when using a search engine, such as Google, click on natural (referred to as "organic") search results far more often then on the accompanying paid ads (those "sponsored results" found on the top right side of any Google search and the top of the page in Yahoo). Furthermore, the research shows that users only bother with the top 5 organic search results (and at most top 10) before they lose interest. A study completed at Cornell by professor Thorsten Joachims and released in 2005 found that 66% of users viewed the top two links, with viewers dropping to 33% for the 3, 4 and and 5th results. By the time they reach the 10th result, only 1 in 10 users bother to view it. The search engine may return millions of web pages in the results, but only the top 5 will see much traffic. It's pretty clear that being found in the top 5 (and at least the top 10) listings in a search results (the higher the results the better) is very important for a business wanting to be successful on the web.

In this and the following SEO Help Files sections, we will discuss how to increase your chances of landing at the top of an organic search result, called “search engine optimization” or "SEO".  In the end, you will see that it takes a lot of work and a long-term commitment  as well as creativity to first get indexed and then work your way up to the top of the search engine rankings. And after all your work, there is no guarantee that your website will achieve a specific ranking in a search engine or that your ranking will stay the same.  But the rewards can be great. And for those companies that profit from the web, it can be well worth the time and effort.

In another section we will also discuss “paid inclusion” options offered by Google and Yahoo, how they differ and how they can enhance your “natural” search engine optimizing efforts.

Which Search Engines Matter

Google
If you have done a search on the web in the last year or so, you have most likely chosen Google as your search engine of choice. Google returns such satisfying results that in the past couple of years they have grown to dominate the search engines. As of November 2005 Goggle, which also still powers AOL, counted for over 53.2% of all searches done on the internet.

Yahoo
Second to Google has been Yahoo. Yahoo is an interesting hybrid. It started as a Directory but recently added search engine capabilities (March 2004). A Directory differs from a search engines in that a directory is compiled by human beings instead of computers. A human being reviews the web page(s) under consideration and decides under which heading in the directory to place each web page.

Yahoo’s search engine, as of November 2005, accounts for 23.4% of the searches on the web.

MSN
MSN introduced their search engine at the end of 2004 and now accounts for 11.4% of searches completed on the web. It is interesting to note that MSN is the only search engine where users prefer the paid listings in the search results over the organic results. But  this could be due to MSN doing less to separate out their paid listings from the organic listings. Their results appear to be heavily skewed towards paid advertising.

Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves had, up until MSN's entry into the search engine game, been the final third player of importance. It now accounts for just 2.3% of all the searches on the internet.

The Other Search Engines
The last 9.7% of searches are completed using all the other myriad smaller search engines available on the web.

What Does This Mean for You

Up until the end of 2004 Google dominated the search engine world. If you wanted to be found by the majority of searchers using the web (79%) you had to really understand how to create a Google friendly site. Even Google's rival, Yahoo, used Google to power its own search engine.  It was a Google world.

Since then much has changed.  With the advent of Yahoo and MSN each creating their own search engines, GOogle share has dropped as noted above.  It is still important but now Yahoo, and MSN must also be viewed as important players when seeking to gain customers from the web.

Of course, your client base may sway towards using one or the other of the search engines but in general, we now have three major players.

And each have some different criteria for what they consider important when they do their “crawling” through the internet in order to rank their findings. They want to see the same elements from us on our web pages, but the weight they give to each element appears from the analysis to differ.

In the next SEO Help Files section we’ll begin to explore the most important elements you need, including meta tag tips, to include in your web design to help boost ranking...

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