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Search Engines have gotten a lot more sophisticated and a lot better at returning relevant search results for the end user. But how do users search? Seems like a silly question, until you realize that getting good traffic to your website from the search engines requires you to know what search words (called keyword phrases) that people use.
Determining which keyword phrases people use requires you to look at
how people search. Let's take the example of the our fictitious
landscaping company that I used in the search engine optimization
article , except let's look at it from the users standpoint.
Identify the problem
Typically
when a user goes to a search engine, it is to solve a problem. That
problem might be “I need more information about . . .”, or “I want to
buy a product that does . . .”. So a user decides they need to get
someone to mow their lawn. They go to a search engine and type in “lawn
mowing services”, but they quickly find that they are getting search
results from companies in Florida, websites that give you information
about how to mow your law, etc. So they decide that what they really
need is a company in Fort Collins, Colorado. So they type in “Fort Collins lawn
mowing services”. Aha, now they are getting somewhere! But there a
still quite a few sites with articles about lawn moving and websites
that are nothing more than regional directories. But the user also
notices that in several descriptions that the words “lawn care” are
being used, so they change their search strategy. Now they type in
“Fort Collins lawn care”, and now they get the results that they
wanted. At the same time they also notice that there are quite a few references to “lawn
maintenance” and “landscaping”, so if they don't find what they want
with “Fort Collins lawn care” they can always change their search
strategy again.
Now that we know this, we might want to make sure
that our site ranks pretty high for “Fort Collins lawn care”, “Fort
Collins lawn maintenance”, and “Fort Collins lawn mowing”. It would be
nice if we knew which of these keyword phrases were searched the most,
and there are ways of finding out, but that will have to wait until
another day (of course if you just can't wait contact me for more
information)
A couple of other interesting search engine related features to mention
are; Google Shopping , Google Images , and geo-targeted search results.
If you are selling products on your website, you should seriously
consider submitting those products to Google Shopping (formerly
Froogle).
Google Shopping
With Google Shopping you can simply enter the product you are
looking for and in return you will see a listing with a product
photograph, description, price and the vendor selling the product.
Optionally you can even add it to a shopping list so that you can
compare items at a later time. Google images is kind of similar except
that it isn't limited to just products, you could be looking for an
image of the Mona Lisa. Simply go to Google Images and type in “Mona
Lisa”, you will get a listing of images (naturally), along with the
dimensions in pixels, what file format it is, and a link to the website
that it is from.
Google Images
Getting in Google Images is also a good idea as people
do use it for product browsing.
Geo-targeting
The last one is geo-targeted search
results, and this is something that you can't really get into, it is
something that the search engines are experimenting with more and more,
especially Google. You will see it when you type in a product or
service along with a city name. For example if you were to type in
“cars” in Google, you would get a listing of sites that have to do with
cars. If however, you were to type in “Fort Collins cars”, at the top
of the search results you will see “Local business results for cars
near Fort Collins, CO”, followed by a Google Map and 10 or so business
listings right next to it. Google has figured out that you probably
want to see who has cars available in Fort Collins and is trying to
make it easier for you. Pretty cool eh? They are also experimenting
with displaying search results that depend on where geographically the
search is coming from. So if a user types in “parks” and their
computers' IP address is from Fort Collins, they can guess that the
user would primarily want results from their geographical area. Now
this gets pretty scary.
Why does Google care?
No doubt the search engines will change the way search results are
displayed to make it easier for the searcher. In fact they are already
starting to use similar words in search results, trying to guess what
you are trying to find. Why are they concerned with search results?
Because they make all of their money on paid listings, you know the
ones on the right hand side. If you don't find their search engine
helpful, you will use another, and then their paid listing sales go
down.
Summary
In summary it really helps to know how people use search engines, so
that we can better understand what keyword phrases we want our website to
rank highly for. If you don't think your site is ranking as high as it
should for popular search terms contact me so that we can discuss how to improve your ranking.
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