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Search Engine Optimization postings.
It hardly seems possible that, until recently, Google was not indexing the New York Times. But as Search Engine Watch reports, the Times is making a serious effort to optimize its site and build traffic. According to Marshall Simmonds, the newspaper’s vice president of enterprise search, the Times had previously relied on the strength of its brand to generate search rankings.
So you’ve just launched the new Web site that your team worked on for months and you do a quick Google search for a few of your keywords and you’re nowhere to be seen. How can this be? You did everything right. You researched SEO and carefully selected keywords and optimized your copy. Your pages validate. You even have a blog as part of you site. What went wrong? The answer is that you’ve done nothing wrong. Other than a common misconception many people make by thinking that search engines magically know everything about their site the moment it goes live. It’s an understandable misconception, after all most search engines aren’t exactly open about how their magic formulas work.
So, using Google as an example I’m going to try explaining how Web pages are indexed.
In McLuhan for Managers (Viking Canada, 2003) Derrick de Kerkckhove and Mark Federman don’t provide “seven habits of successful companies” or a new strategy for business success. They offer four questions that were originally asked in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media.
This ultimately makes de Kerkckhove and Federman’s book a far more timeless work. It provides a mechanism to step outside the current mindset and ask, “What haven’t we noticed lately?” Granted, the questions address media; but modes of communication are fundamental forces in the businesses and marketing. In McLuhan’s words, the “medium is the message” that our customers and employees are responding to.
According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, the total number of searches in August on all the major search engines exceeded 5 billion! These monthly figures keep climbing at a torrid pace. Getting a high ranking on popular search engines can translate into a great deal of additional visits to your Web site, and this can ultimately have a big effect on sales.
Another iProspect study also indicates the importance of ranking high in search engine placement. It demonstrates how quickly people drop out of the search process beyond the first few pages. Based on the study results, here are the cumulative totals regarding the average search depth by a person using a major search engine:
- Searcher only viewed the first few entries: 22.6%
- Searcher stopped after the first page: 41.2%
- Searcher stopped after the first two pages: 67.0%
- Searcher stopped after the first three pages: 81.7%
If a company doesn’t show up on the first two pages of a search, only 1/3 of the people who are looking for information will find them via the search engine. Other studies have shown that appearing on the first three search pages of Google alone can increase unique visitors to a company’s Web site 10-fold and result in double the sales!
ClickZ reports about a new study by Marketing Sherpa that is truly impressive. Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Call are showing dramatic rises in usage and effectiveness. This was a large study with 3,271 marketers responding.
As the study indicated, SEO spending increased 177 percent over the last 12 months. The story reports that among both B2B and B2C marketers, there were impressive gains in effectiveness for SEO, PPC and Pay-Per Call campaigns. Pay-Per-Call had the largest 12-month gain with 43 percent of marketers rating their campaigns as “very effective.”
Other items of note: