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APRIL 2008 W5 ALERT Do You Know How You Rate?
As Far As Search Engine Results, New Research Shows You Better Find Out! <April 30, 2008>Have you checked your rating lately? Your search engine rating, I mean. According to a story from eMarketer, a new survey of U.S. adults who use search engines shows that searchers are getting increasingly itchy to get what they want fast.
Sixty-eight percent of search engine users only view the first page of results before they make a selection. Twenty-seven percent only review the first few items! In 2002, fully fifty-two percent viewed two or more pages of results before they made their selection. Now? Only thirty-two percent search two or more pages of results before making a selection.
According to eMarketer, if the searchers did not find what they were looking for in their desired initial level of search, they didn’t abandon their search – they simply changed their terms or criteria and conducted a new search.
Respondents also stated a clear preference for so-called “organic” (unpaid) searches as opposed to pay-per-click advertisement search results.
This means that you need to pay very close attention to Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO refers to steps that are taken to ensure that your site rates highly in the results of popular search engines. It is a little bit art and a little bit science.
There are whole armies of consulting companies that exist to help you improve your search engine rankings. However, there are a few simple steps you can take to help you move up the search engine ladder.
First, make sure that you have unique content that is maintained on pages structured to be easily indexed by search engine spiders or bots (programs that go out on the Internet to search for and scan pages to add to the search engines results). Make sure that you have submitted your website to the search engine to be scanned.
For Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
For Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
For MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
There are many other tips such as making sure you use descriptive titles on all of your pages and make repetitive use of any words throughout your pages that you consider key words to your site.
Finally, one key determinant to search engine ranking is to have content on your site that others want to link to. Incoming links can be a key criteria for search engine ranking. |
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