Chapter 1:
Putting Search Engines in Context
The Internet offers a world of information, both good and bad. Almost
anything a person could want is merely a few taps on the keyboard and
a couple clicks of a mouse away. A good rule of thumb for the Internet is if
you want to know about something or purchase something, there’s probably
already a Web site just for that. The catch is actually finding it. This is
what brings you to this book. You have a Web site. You have hired what you
hope is a crack team of designers and have unleashed your slick, shiny new
site upon the Web, ready to start making money. However, there is a bit of
a problem: Nobody knows that your site exists. How will people find your
Web site?
The most common way that new visitors will find your site is through a
search engine. A search engine is a Web application designed to hunt for
specific keywords and group them according to relevance. It used to be,
in the stone age of the 1990s, that most Web sites were found via directories
or word-of-mouth. Somebody linked to your Web site from their Web
site, or maybe somebody posted about it on one of their newsgroups, and
people found their way to you. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and
Microsoft Live were created to cut out the middleman and bring your user
to you with little hassle and fuss.
In this chapter, we show you how to find your audience by giving you the
tools to differentiate between types of users, teaching you to sort out
search engines, identifying the necessary elements for being prominent in
those engines, and giving you an insider look at how all the search engines
work together.
Identifying Search Engine Users
Who is using search engines? Well, everyone. A significant amount of all Web
traffic to Web sites comes from search engines. Unless you are a household
name like eBay or Amazon, chances are people won’t know where you are
unless they turn to a search engine and hunt you down. In fact, even the big
brands get most of their traffic from search engines. Search engines are the
biggest driver of traffic on the Web and their influence only continues to
grow.
But although search engines drive traffic to Web sites, you have to remember
that your Web site is only one of several and a half trillion other Web
sites out there. Chances are, if someone does a search, even for a product
that you sell, your Web site won’t automatically pop up in the first page of
results. If you’re lucky and the query is targeted enough, you might end up
somewhere in the top 100 of the millions of results returned. That might be
okay if you’re only trying to share your vacation photos with your family,
but if you need to sell a product, you need to appear higher in the results. In
most cases, you want the number one spot on the first page because that’s
the site everyone looks at and that most people click.
In this section, you find out a bit more about the audience available to you
and how to narrow down how to reach them.
Figuring out how much people spend
The fact of the matter is that people spend money on the Internet. It’s frightfully
easy: All you need is a credit card, a computer with an Internet connection,
and something that you’ve been thinking about buying. E-commerce
in the United States reached $34.7 billion in the third quarter of 2007 alone.
Some project that e-commerce could reach $1 trillion a year by 2012.
Combine that with the fact that most Americans spend an average of 24
minutes a day shopping online, not including the time they spend actually
getting to the Web site (19 minutes), and you’re looking at a viable means of
moving your product. To put it simply, “There’s gold in them thar hills!”
So, now you need to get people to your Web site. In real estate, the most
important thing is location, location, location, and the same is true of the
Internet. On the Web, however, instead of having a prime piece of property,
you need a high listing on the search engine results page (SERP). Your placement
in these results is referred to as your ranking. You have a few options
when it comes to achieving that. One, you can make your page the best it
can be and hope that people will find you, or two, you can pay for one of the
few advertising slots. More than $12 billion was spent in 2007 on the North
American search marketing industry alone. Eighty-eight percent of that was
spent on pay per click (PPC) advertising, in which you pay to have search
engines display your ad. The other 12 percent goes to search engine optimization
(SEO). SEO, when properly done, helps you to design your Web site
in such a way that when a user is doing a search, your pages appear on the
first page of returned results, hopefully in the top spot. Your main focus in
this book is finding out about SEO, but because they overlap somewhat, you
pick up a bit of PPC knowledge here and there along the way.
Knowing your demographics
In order to get the most bang for your SEO buck, you need to know the
demographics for your Web visitors. You need to know who’s looking for
you, because you’ll need to know where best to advertise. For example, if
you’re selling dog sweaters, it’s probably not a great idea to advertise in
biker bars. Sure, there might be a few Billy Bob Skullcrushers with a cute
little Chihuahua in need of a cashmere shrug, but statistically, your ad would
probably do much better in a beauty salon. The same goes for your Web
site in a search engine. Gender, age, and income are just a few of the metrics
that you’ll want to track in terms of identifying your audience. Search
engine users are pretty evenly split between male and female search engine
users, with a few slight differences: 50.2 percent of Yahoo! users are female,
whereas 53.6 percent of Google users are male. In terms of age brackets, the
older set leans more towards using Ask.com, and the younger users wind up
on Yahoo! and MSN.com most often. In fact, Ask.com is changing their focus
in order to cater specifically to married women. Google reaps the highest
number of users with an income of $100,000 a year or more. Search engines
even feed their results into other search engines, as you can in see our
handy-dandy Search Engine Relationship Chart later in this chapter.
Table 1-1 breaks down user demographics across the search engines for
your reference.
Table 1-1 User Demographics Across Major Search Engines
Google Yahoo!Search MSN Search
Female 46.58% 50.76% 54.26%
Male 53.42% 49.24% 45.74%
18-34 43.57% 48.23% 39.53%
35-54 42.85% 39.83% 44.49%
55+ 13.57% 11.94% 15.99%
Under $30K/year 20.00% 21.87% 21.01%
$30K-100K/year 57.05% 57.69% 58.84%
Over $100K/year 22.95% 20.44% 2 0.16%
For the 12-week period ending May 15, 2004
You need to know who your search engine visitors are because this demographic
data helps you effectively target your market. This demographic
distribution is often associated with search query keywords, the words that
search engine visitors use to search for your products. For an in-depth look
at choosing keywords, you can check out Book II, Chapter 2, but a brief summary
is that keywords are what a search engine looks for when figuring out
what sites to show in the SERP. Basically your keywords are the words you
used in your search query — or what you typed into the little search window.
If you are searching for something like information on customizing classic
cars, for example, you would type [custom classic cars] into the search field.
(When we discuss search queries through the book, we use square brackets
to show the keywords. You wouldn’t actually type the brackets into the
search field.) Figure 1-1 displays a typical search engine results page for the
query [custom classic cars].
The search engine goes to work combing its index for Web pages containing
these specific keywords and returns to you with your results. That way, if
you have a product that’s geared towards a certain age bracket, or towards
women more than men, you can tailor your keywords accordingly. It may
seem inconsequential, but trust me, this is important if you want to be
ranked well for targeted searches.
