MSEOKING - HOW PEOPLE INTERACT WITH SEARCH ENGINE

It is vital that you understand how people interact with the search engines if you have a website that you want to market and promote through search. When you understand how your target market interacts with the search engines you will be able to focus your search optimization strategy and target the correct search phrases.

The search process has evolved over the years but the main principles have remained the same. Billions of searches are conducted monthly using search engines with Google the search engine of choice capturing more than 60% of the market during the first quarter of 2010. Search engines aim to provide users with the most relevant information based on the search query entered and 85% of users find the information that they are looking for when conducting a search.

Search Steps and Processes: 

• The user experiences the need for an answer, solution or piece of information.
• The user creates a search query using words or phrases to describe his or her need.
• The user enters this search query into his or her search engine of choice.
• The user browses through the results (normally only the top 10).
• The user clicks on one of the results that looks like a match.
• The user scans the information to determine if it is what he or she is looking for.
• If unsatisfied the user will return to the search results to browse the rest of the results.
• If none of the results provide the correct information the user will formulate a new search query and start the process again.

Based on results from an April 2010 comScore study Google Sites captured 64.4% of the search market in April 2010 with Yahoo Sites at 17.7% and Microsoft Sites at 11.8%. More than 15.5 Billion searches were conducted in April 2010 by Americans with Google Sites accounting for 10 billion searches. The first 4 ranking positions receive more than 70% of the click-thru traffic with the first 10 ranking positions receiving around 90% of the click-thru traffic.

More people are using search to find local businesses and to research a product before purchasing it from a local store. This increase in the use of search engines to find local businesses and products highlights the importance of effective search engine marketing.

How to use this information: 

1. Research search phrases that normal users will enter into the search query to find your business.
2. Optimize your website for these keywords and phrases.
3. Build high quality links to your website from respected and relevant sites using your chosen keywords in the anchor text of the links.
4. Target local search if you provide a product or service that is location driven.
5. Track and monitor your keyword rankings.
6. Keep on optimizing your keywords until they reach the top 4 ranking positions and maintain your rankings over time.

Organic search is one of the biggest traffic generators on the Web and search is very popular. Make sure that you implement an effective keyword optimization strategy for your website in order to capture your share of the market. Search engine optimization for your business website is a must and should not be neglected. Being listed in the top search engine results is critical to high visibility and generating targeted traffic to your website.

MSEOKING - HOW SEARCH ENGINE OPERATE

Search Engines, especially Google have evolved technologically (amongst other parameters) over the years. The computing power of the software and hardware now deployed by the search giant can better be assessed in terms of the functions it performs and its wide reach.

How Search Engines Work

Broadly speaking, search engines' functions can be divided into three:

* Crawling

This is the use of special software commonly known as bots, crawlers or spiders to access information on various websites through principally three means:

1. Links from other websites already in the search engine's index or gathered while crawling
2. Url's/links submitted by webmasters
3. Sitemaps submitted by webmasters

Ordinarily one would visualize the bots as some crawling objects moving rapidly all over the web via links to reach different websites in performing its tasks. However, in reality that is not the case. It operates from a particular physical location and is akin to your web browser. It operates by sending various requests to the web servers from which it downloads/fetches various information on new web pages, updated web pages and dead links which are all used to update it's index.

As web pages are crawled, new links detected on these web pages are added to the engine's list of pages to crawl.

In the process of crawling, the engines encounter challenges in the sense that there is a trade off between minimizing the resources it spends on crawling and maintaining an up to date index. It tries to avoid re-indexing an unchanged web page while it tries to capture all changed web pages in order to keep its index always current.

* Indexing

The search engines stores the pages its crawlers retrieve from various web pages in a massive index database. It sorts this information based on search terms and arranges it in alphabetical order. This sorting enables rapid retrieval of documents from the index when search queries demand them.

It processes the words in the web pages noting the location of the keywords within the pages e.g. title tags, alt attributes. The engines do process many, but not all content types. As an illustration, it cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

To improve search performance, the search engines ignore (doesn't index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). These words are so common and do little to narrow a search, and therefore can safely be ignored. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, in addition to converting all letters to lowercase, to improve it's performance.

* Search Query Processor

This is what most search users are conversant with and in fact quite often erroneously regard as the "search engine". It comprises some components with the most visible being the search box or interface through which the search user interacts with the search engine, forwarding his search query for processing.

When a user sends in a query through the interface, the index rapidly retrieves the most relevant documents for the search query. Relevance is determined algorithmically based on many ranking factors numbering over 200.

A key factor amongst these is PageRank which is a measure of the importance of a web page. This is determined by the number and quality of links pointing to the web page. It is however important to stress that not all links are equal as links emanating from high ranked web pages is considered more powerful than links from low ranked web pages.