Website Optimisation Consultant
A guide to Internet Marketing

SEO and Internet Marketing

The Search Engines

The big three Search Engine companies, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft ("Bing" – formerly Live Search and MSN Search) handle the majority of Search Engine traffic. There are more than 13 billion searches worldwide each month.

Google and Yahoo! Search are the dominant Search Engines. The following Table compares the popularity of the top Search Engines (Source ComScore):

Google

Google is king of online search and no other search engine comes close. With 65% of all search engine traffic, the marketing power Google is enormous. As Google handles most of the searches, the pages that follow refer mainly to Google. The SEO for the other Search Engines is unchanged.

Initially focus on improving your Rankings in Google. This will yield the best overall results.

Google's Personalised Search

Google now returns Personalised Search results – all search results take into account previous browsing history. The Websites most often clicked will rank higher in the searches. But the major SEO factors, like the structure of the HTML, quality content and quality links, will still be important in deciding the ranking of a Website.

To disable history-based Personalised Search:

• In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History.
• On the resulting page, click 'Disable customizations'.

Microsoft's Bing

The market share of Bing is increasing (at the expense of Yahoo!, ASK and AOL) and it is soon to become a major player – especially with the merging of the skills of Yahoo! and Microsoft. Click to download a write-up on the new features of Bing.

Bing is optimised for a different demographic than Google. While Google is best for technical searches, Bing targets the non technical shoppers.

The Search Engine optimisation rules for Bing are no different than those of Google.

Website Indexing

A Bot is a program that runs continuously, and automates Web searching. Bots are also called spiders and website crawlers. They explore the World Wide Web by retrieving Web pages and following all the hyperlinks. Words are selected from titles, headings, links, images and Meta tags. The Search Engines then generate Indexes from the extracted words. The Bots will eventually (don't hold your breath) find and index all the pages of all Websites. When a Search Engine is used to look for a phrase, it retrieves the best match from the indexed words.

The big three have many other Search Engines as affiliates, so you will be also listed on more than 25 of the largest Search Engines.

There are two types of listings: Free and Paid. It is getting harder to distinguish between the two. Paid listings are normally at the very top, or on the right hand side of a search page. Up to 85% of searchers ignore Paid listings. Searchers trust the search engines, rather than companies that have paid for top Rankings.

Ranking Algorithms

Each time a user does a search, the index returns all the Website pages containing the search phrase. These pages are then Ranked, using constantly changing algorithms, to determine the most relevant results.

The Search Engines, whether Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook or Twitter will return different results, as each concentrates on different aspects of the searchers needs. Each Search Engine attempts to dominate their niche.

• The dominant Google has the most advanced Ranking Algorithms.
• Bing concentrates on sectors like health, shopping, air fares.
• Facebook aims at a circle of personal friends for information.
• Twitter introduced real-time searches on the latest chatter.

There are many attributes that are involved in assessing ranking – PageRank, freshness, location, previous searches, synonyms, language, abbreviations, recognised authorities, misspellings, slang – and many more.

It all boils down to the Search Engine trying to understand what the user is looking for, and then minimising the number of successive searches needed.

Getting Indexed

Your Website should be submitted, at a minimum, to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Submissions to these sites are free. AOL is able to quickly index a Website without a submission.

There are also many local directories that can improve visibility. But if they accept every Website, the directory listing will not improve the PageRank of a Website.

Spidering Websites

The frequency that a Bot spiders your Website, is closely related to how often the Website is updated. The more frequently the Website is updated, the more frequent the spidering.

The time taken for a Website to be indexed after spidering is also related to the frequency that the Website is updated. It is usually half the time between Website updates.

At the bottom of each page of this Website, there is a Build date showing when the Website was last updated. By viewing the Build date of the Search Engine's cached version, the date when the page was last spidered can be determined.

Checking on a Website's Listing

To find out if a Website has been indexed or what the listing looks like, enter the Website's URL (i.e. nev.romtech.com.au)

Then Click on a Search Engine

A listing example

Neville Silverman: Visual Basic, Access and SQL Server Database, Website Design
Visual Basic Programming, Access and SQL Server Database development, Microsoft Office automation, Website design and Search Engine Optimisation
nev.romtech.com.au/Skills-Summary.aspx - 36k - Cached - More from this site

It is important to see what the Search Engine lists for each Keyword phrase. Make sure that the marketing message displayed provides the greatest chance of a visit, and the best possibility of a sale.