Have you ever wondered what people are doing when they go online? Did you know that the vast majority of people go online to look for information or to comparison shop?
How do they find the information they're looking for? Through the search engines and directories.
That's where your search engine experience can give you a competitive advantage over the majority of Web site owners. You know that people are going online to look for information. If you can create that information and place it in front of your target audience, you'll attract them to your site.
Read these shocking statistics. According to Penn State researchers, 54 percent of users view just one page of search results when performing searches at a search engine. Only an additional 19 percent went on to the second page of results, and fewer than 10 percent bothered with the third page of results. Another interesting statistic: about 55 percent of users checked out one result only. More than 80 percent stopped after looking at three results.
What does this mean to you? It's crucial that your pages be found in the top-10 search results for your most important keyword phrases. Even better, try to get in the top 3.
How do you create these high performance pages? By determining your target audience, and then doing keyword research to learn what that audience is looking for when they go online. Then, you'll create content-rich informational pages (possibly by using Page Generator), run them through Page Critic, submit them, and you're well on your way to attracting your target audience to your Web site.
How do search engines work?
After your Web pages are submitted to the search engines, the search engines send their "spiders" (sophisticated software programs) to your Web pages to crawl them, index the contents, and spider links.
When your target audience visits a search engine, they enter keywords into the search box. Often they enter several keywords, or "phrases," to further refine their searches. Search engines sort through the Web pages in their databases by the words they contain that match a given search. Your goal is to make sure your pages show up in the top results under the keywords your target audience is using to find the information you're providing.
How well you incorporate important keywords into your Web site consistent with each individual search engine's ranking criteria will partially determine your Web site's rank. Since there could be thousands of pages with that same keyword or phrase on it, it's important that you rank near the top of the results to be found.
Generally, each search engine assigns "points" to Web sites or the submission someone made describing that Web site based on some predefined criteria. While this ranking criteria may vary from search engine to search engine, most "grade" the page based on the following general rules:
· Keyword Placement (Area)
· Keyword Frequency
· Total Words
· Keyword Weight
· Keyword Prominence
· Site Popularity
· Link Reputation
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