5 things I’ve learned about search
23 Sep
I’m one week into a six-week course on search engine optimization, which means we’ve barely learned the difference between a search engine and a directory. But I wanted to pass along five valuable lessons I’ve learned so far.
1. The top 5 search engines receive more than 90 percent of all search traffic. They are: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask. The top three are pretty much neck-and-neck in terms of the audience they reach in a given month.
2. If you’re not listed on the first, second or third page of search results, you’re most likely not going to get any traffic through search.
3. The instructor of my class, Bob Viers, suggests steering clear of some sponsored links. “Research has shown that sponsored links that appear to the left or to the right of the Web search results are not very appealing to Web surfers.”
He suggests instead buying sponsored links that look like actual listings.
4. To see how people actually use search engines, check out Dogpiles’s Searchspy, which shows you what people are searching for at that moment.
5. Some search engines, including AltaVista, allow you to see which sites are linking to your site. Just seach for +link:yoursitehere.com. For example, here’s a list of sites linking to DesMoinesRegister.com.
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Some counterpoints to this. On item 1., the audience reach maybe similar for Google, Yahoo! and MSN, but Google gets over 70% of the search traffic. So if you focus search, you best just target Google.
On item 2., I’d go for just the first page. If you can’t show up there then you don’t exist for the given search term.
Finally on 3., while research does show most don’t look at the side ads, click-through rates are still good (why do you think Google is rolling in money?). The key thing to remember is volume. Google is doing 2,300 queries a second. Even a tiny click-through rate translates to a serious number of visitors. Try it for yourself. Buy some Google AdWords and point them to your blog; you can do it for as little as $20. Then you’ll have real world experience in search engine marketing.
Yeah, I’m guessing we’ll be most heavily into Google from here on out in the class. But like I said, it’s only week 1! We had to cover the basics.
To be fair to the instructor of the class, nothing you say here counters what we’re learning. But I appreciate you expanding on the topics. I plan to do the same in future posts.