Posts Tagged ‘search engine results’
The Launch of Linker - SEO’s Version of Matchmaking
Ten days ago, after a long period of development followed by extensive testing during our Beta period, Linker has been launched to the public for anyone to sign up.
In the early days of the Internet, before the search engines came along, navigation was driven by links which allowed people to jump from one place (document) to another. People used hyperlinks as authors use footnotes in reference texts. The purpose of the links were to provide citations, and to advise readers of other valuable resources which they ought to consult.
When the Internet began to become popular with the masses, marketers started using links as a means of traffic acquisition. I did this type of link building as far back in the mid 1990’s “Before Google” for my own businesses. This marketing trend was actually followed by, not preceded by the search engines recognizing the value of links, and embedding a weighting value for links into their algorithms. Of course, at first the search engine did things differently, valuing any old link as a positive score. When this link recognition system was discovered as a performance score value in search results, it was unsurprising that some marketers saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. What is surprising is how far away from the fundamental reasons for link building the noise in the marketplace has taken this strategy, especially in light of how strongly the search engines have driven away from volume. Their mantra could be qualified as back to the future in regards to link values.
The reality is high value links matter. Period. A high quality link is one which readers will find of value. Generally, these links are found within the body content of a document and the link points out to content on another page or site which is relevant to your content. Your link is adding perspective for your readers, and also helping build both your sites’ authority in the search results.
Finding great resources to link to is not easy however. There’s so much content, how do you know which are the best resources, and the ones which are the most relevant to you and your readers? Just as importantly, how do you get in contact with representatives of the right sites which are the appropriate matches for yours? This was the challenge I used to face as an online marketer, and the manual process I was explaining internally when we came up with the idea behind Linker.
I’ll be starting a series of posts shortly around the philosophy behind the Linker product, and how it came to be. The reality is, no one likes to get all those spammy “link to me” emails that flood our email inboxes. They really are useless Junk. Links from, or to these low value, low relevance domains won’t add to your site’s user experience, or add any value to your business in terms of visibility in the search engines. That said, everyone with any online marketing knowledge recognizes that link building is a formidable tool in any good marketing campaign. The point everyone needs to focus on is that good quality, relevant link-building improves the user experience of your web site, and at the same time also drives traffic via search engines and direct referrals. Addressing this need is why we built Linker, a context and relevance driven introduction system which people have labeled a dating service for online marketers.
What Page in the Search Results do People Click On?
What page in the search results do people click on, and depending on that, how many pageviews should you expect, and how long will they spend on your site?
Last year, I made a post on this blog about how deep in the search results do people actually go before they clicked through on a result. At that point I found that the percentage of traffic from page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs) was increasing over time. I finally had an opportunity to revisit that data, and decided to augment the data with two additional pieces of very valuable information to web marketers:
- Do visitors from page 1 in the SERPs spend more time on websites?
- Do visitors from page 1 in the SERPs view more pages on websites?
I’m going to post that information in separate posts, hopefully over the next few days. I’ll also be posting information showing how visitors using different browsers spend differing time on site, and don’t all view the same number of web pages. Time permitting, I’ll also post how that’s true of visitors from different search engines, and dependent on the number of keywords they use in queries. For example if someone visits your site from a search engine and they used just one keyword to search, will they spend more time and view more pages than someone who used two keywords?
First off, the information about how your placement within the search results pages affects your visitor counts. The percentage of traffic from page one in the SERPs has continued to grow steadily, to the point now that if your website is not listed on page one of the search results, your business may as well be invisible. Remember, it’s not that you need to be found on page 1 for your brand name, although that’s useful, you absolutely need to be found on page 1 of the SERPs for terms which your customers are using to find your type of service / product / information.
What page in the search results do visitors visit your site from?
Please note there’s a gap in months, historical data is there to show the trend.
From this graphic, it’s obvious to anyone that if you’re not on page 1 in the search results, you won’t see much traffic. There’s still value to page 2, but it’s an ever shrinking fraction of page one referral traffic.
Of course, the data for the table is included here:
| 2007-04 | 2007-05 | 2007-06 | 2007-07 | 2007-08 | 2007-09 | |
|
Page 1
|
85.50% | 86.03% | 87.18% | 87.79% | 88.07% | 88.40% |
|
Page 2
|
7.61% | 7.52% | 6.90% | 6.52% | 6.47% | 6.44% |
|
Page 3
|
2.84% | 2.71% | 2.48% | 2.35% | 2.28% | 2.21% |
|
Page 4
|
1.30% | 1.19% | 1.09% | 1.04% | 1.00% | 0.92% |
|
Page 5
|
0.82% | 0.75% | 0.69% | 0.66% | 0.64% | 0.58% |
| 2007-10 | 2007-11 | 2007-12 | 2008-01 | 2008-02 | 2008-03 | |
|
Page 1
|
88.42% | 88.47% | 88.81% | 88.90% | 88.78% | 89.71% |
|
Page 2
|
6.47% | 6.44% | 6.23% | 6.19% | 6.39% | 5.93% |
|
Page 3
|
2.20% | 2.16% | 2.05% | 2.06% | 2.04% | 1.85% |
|
Page 4
|
0.92% | 0.91% | 0.89% | 0.88% | 0.87% | 0.78% |
|
Page 5
|
0.57% | 0.57% | 0.55% | 0.55% | 0.54% | 0.46% |
| 2009-10 | 2009-11 | |||||
|
Page 1
|
95.24% | 95.80% | ||||
|
Page 2
|
2.75% | 2.44% | ||||
|
Page 3
|
0.86% | 0.75% | ||||
|
Page 4
|
0.39% | 0.34% | ||||
|
Page 5
|
0.22% | 0.20% |
Enquisite collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, and reflects click through activity data.