Did you know 81% of users
found new Web sites by using search engines? Is your Web site
properly positioned for search engines? According to a recent
survey, over 75% of US business Web sites fail to establish a
Web site positioning campaign to improve search engine
rankings. A high search engine ranking can make a significant
difference to the number visits to your site. No visits means
no return on investment. Common sense means you simply have to
make your site accessible. Target Marketing Magazine reports
that a user is 4 times more likely to discover a Web site
through a search engine than any other way including, banner
advertising, TV and magazine ads, word-of-mouth, and random
surfing.
Does your company have a Web site positioning strategy?
Differentiation is a key element for both general success in
your vertical space, and also for search engine standings.
When you clearly understand your position relates to your
competitors, the marketplace and your customers, you can more
easily formulate an effective positioning strategy. A
positioning strategy includes traditional marketing elements -
product, price, position and place, plus the search topic
keywords people use to search the Internet. If you want to
ensure that targeted traffic is driven to your site, an
effective web marketing strategy is imperative.
A successful Web site
positioning strategy will project your site high in the search
engine rankings, making it easy for your potential customers
to find you. To help accomplish this it is essential that the
investment in your web site has a defined objective, and that
ongoing analysis of measurable goals is performed, to ensure
that any web site positioning strategy is producing the
benefits you expect.
Google
Google states: "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic
nature of the Web by using its vast link structure as an
indicator of an individual page's value." |
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Google further explains not
only is the sheer volume of links or endorsements a page
receives important, but the evaluation of the page linking in
to the page. This is the hub site to authority site
relationship; a site's worth as referrer depends on the
authority of the sites it links out to, and vice versa.
Yahoo
Yahoo's share is presently just under 18 percent. These
figures include local search market share, but it's difficult
to tell just how big a piece of the pie Yahoo has in local
search. Its local information is spread across three
cross-linked platforms: Yahoo Local, Yahoo Yellow Pages, and
Yahoo Maps. Google, for its part, concentrates its efforts
within Google Maps. Keep in mind, Yahoo may be just as
important as Google Maps in the world of local search. Why?
Because the Yahoo family includes many niche portals --
including the three already mentioned -- that are widely used
by those searching for what is very often local information.
Ask
Ask.com has been working to improve its speed and the
relevance of its search results in an effort to increase
return users. In a bid to get people to conduct searches
through the site more often, Ask has been working on improving
the speed and relevance of results. It is the latest in a long
line of overhauls for the search engine once known as Ask
Jeeves. Ask sped up search result download times by 30 percent
and has increased the number of sites it indexes content from
and the amount of material it gets from those sites. And Ask
has tweaked the algorithm it uses to rank search results.
Bing (MSN Search)
All three engines have been using a variation of link analysis
to determine what's relevant and what gets ranked into their
databases. But recent news has been about Microsoft's research
into BrowseRank -- analysis that includes time spent at a site
or page -- added into the source and number of links to the
content.
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