Stats, Facts and Organic SEO

Everybody loves lists and statistics. From the annual Top100 movies of all time lists to the Top10 cities in which to live, even the simplest comparative studies can captivate people and inform pop-culture opinions. Folks use lists to prove points, gauge their own successes and get a reckoning on what's going on around them.

WebProWorld Our love of lists affects us in both profound and subtle ways. Today's search engine users have long been conditioned to believe that the stuff found at or near the top of a list ranks among the best of whatever vintage is being examined. After all, it was found at or near the top of a list that might contain over 1,000,000 other references. Now, many of those top listings were affected by another group of people who live for lists and statistics, search engine marketers. SEOs and SEMs take great interest in a number of lists and statistics beyond the Top10 search rankings. One of the most helpful aspects of working on the Internet is the ease of compiling and tracking statistical data. It is relatively simple to find statistics on user numbers for the major search engines and for unique clients. There are three types of stats that are relevant to a specific client. The first two sets are comprised of external factors and the third set is made up of client specific factors. The ability to combine information from all three areas into a coherent plan is arguably the greatest asset a professional search marketer offers his or her clients. While the information itself runs from the vague to the highly detailed, the compilation of all of it can provide a rich view with a complete background. When looking at external factors that effect search marketing planning, statistics tend to fall into two general categories. The first describes the overall search environment and search related options available to the client. The second category describes the search environment in relation to the sector in which our client works. Internal stats are compiled with a view to understanding how our marketing plan is working based on the behaviours of visitors and search spiders. The overall search environment changes from time to time. Knowing who is what and where in the search engine universe is important to knowing who will view your clients' messages. Some search engines drive more traffic than others do. Some appeal to different types of users. Each of the major search engines has a following though as statistics and common sense tell us, those who lead sometimes lose their followers. Over the past four years, Google has dominated the search scene. Up until last year, Google fed results to most other search engines including Yahoo, which fed some results to MSN. This outward pollination of search results made Google responsible (directly or indirectly) for over 80% of search results worldwide. After Yahoo and MSN developed their own proprietary search tools, Google's influence dropped to 54% of search results as measured in the Search Engine Watch regularly publishes stats about the major search engines. All search marketers know there are several search tools delivering traffic to commercial websites. While Google is the largest of all, it is important to get placements across numerous search tools. Though there are hundreds, if not thousands of search tools working on the web right now, less than ten of them provide enough traffic to be considered statistically relevant to SEOs and SEMs. In the organic listings field, there are four major search engines and about six minor ones. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are considered the Big4 as they each have their own unique spiders and ranking algorithms. Following the Big4 are, AOL, Lycos, Netscape, AltaVista, FAST, and Excite. Each of the six smaller search tools mentioned above has some sort of loyal-user following though they are not nearly as popular as the Big4. A primary reason for this is the fact that the six smaller search tools are actually fed results from one or more of the Big4. This brings us to another interesting and essential list for search engine marketers, the Search Engine Relationship Chart. Search marketers need to know which search engines feed other search engines in order to know where to focus their energies for optimal results. One of the more popular versions of this list is found at the http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Statistics_and_Demographics/ Another component of the overall environment is user behaviours. There are similarities and differences between user behaviours based on the search engine they primarily use. Each search engine has a distinct base of users but users of all search engines do share common habits. The way they look at search results is fairly common across all engines for instance. The results pages of Google, MSN and Yahoo all look vaguely similar. While they each might use different colour schemes, the positioning of paid and organic results is almost exactly alike from one engine to another. Since search is primarily a text based medium, search engine users read results as one might read a commercial magazine or newspaper. They tend to skip the obvious advertising and focus on the content, in this case the organic listings. We know this because of the exhaustive WordTracker tool, which shows us the relative popularity of general keywords and suggests more specific ones based on the number of times search engine users entered the words or phrases. A search for Blue Widgets on the OKS shows that nobody used that phrase last month though 3330 searches did look for information on widgets. Similar results were found with a list generated by WordTracker. This steers us back to the client site to look for other keyword targets. Being the wise optimizers we are, we know that Widgets are mini-applications for the Mac OS so our search hypothetically moved to Mac related keywords and phrases and, of course, struck a virtual mother lode of keyword choices. After identifying the strongest keyword targets, we become curious who the Top5 competitors are, and what they are doing to be there. This range of inquiry will move us from sector-specific to client site-specific research. There are several factors influencing the organic placement of sites but they can be placed in four basic categories, Titles, tags, text and links. In order to perform a good competitive analysis, as well as to get a handle on what we'll need to do on our client's site, we look at several elements in these four basic categories. Each search engine takes information from these categories though each treats that information slightly differently. When examining a number of competing sites against a client's site, we look for similarities among the top ranking competitor sites, often to see if we've missed anything critical in our assumptions but also to see if those similarities contributed to their joint success on the search engines. Onsite factors tend to be somewhat similar with keywords used in the titles and meta tags and sprinkled through the text of documents on the site. Frequently all top sites use keyword phrases as the anchor text of internal links. We are always curious to find the average number of times competitors use keywords on their documents or phrase links with keyword laced anchor text. This helps us decide how to write competitive copy for our clients. Our greatest interest for both client and competitors is the number of incoming links and the quality of those links. To check links, we use a number of tools but the most realistic view can be gained from the search engines themselves. To find out how many links (and which links) Google sees pointed to a website, go to Google and type link: www.domainname.com into the search box. The number that appears near the top right hand corner of the monitor tells you the number of links Google recognizes. A quick and often random scan of those links can tell you how relevant they are. One stat we are NOT particularly interested in is the PageRank score as shown by the Google Toolbar. While we have conditioned ourselves to read most algorithm related announcements from Google with extreme skepticism, we do believe them when they say that the PageRank score on the Google Toolbar is for entertainment rather than informative purposes only. It is amazing that some SEOs are still interested in PageRank and even more amazing that some have established continuing businesses based on selling links from high PR sites. (For those of you involved with an SEO selling links from High PR sites, take a few minutes to ask your current SEO to explain the relevance of PageRank and then phone a few others at random to see what they say. You might be unpleasantly surprised.) Stats and provable facts are cool. Compiling them is hard work but once they are recorded, they provide an invaluable information resource that can grow as the campaign matures. Once an SEO starts keeping hard stats on the overall search environment and client sectors within the search environment, their own professional resource libraries expand quickly. At this stage of the search-marketing sector's growth, SEOs and SEMs are consultative advisors as much as they are hands-on technicians. Having the stats literally at your fingertips saves time in the long run and forms a foundation for a strong campaign. Sources: Stats from Search Engine Watch Hitwise Search Engine Ratings http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451 comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Rankings http://www.clickz.com/stats/ Search Engine Relationship Chart from IhelpYouServices.com/forums http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html Global Internet Languages (Global Reach, March 2004) StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198