Search Referrals and Organic Traffic Rising

Search Referrals and Organic Traffic Rising

As a companion piece to the post by my colleague Heather Hopkins, I thought it would be interesting to take a step back and look at the overall impact of search upon specific industries. For the majority of categories measured at Hitwise, search is the top source of traffic referrals and the share has increased year-over-year. Overall, search is increasing as a traffic driver. Among the parent categories that received less than 25% of traffic from search in April 2008, all except News & Media received a higher share of search referrals last month. This data suggests that the best growth opportunities for search are among the laggard categories where adoption has been slower as a referral tool.

Overall, visits to search engines increased 8% on April 2009 as compared to the previous year, implying that those visits will result in the searcher going somewhere afterwards. In order to translate the impact of search referrals upon traffic, I also took the size of the category into account and calculated the market share of visits that were search driven for the same year-over-year comparison. In this analysis, when translated into visits, the largest categories received more visits from search, regardless if overall traffic was up or down.

As Heather pointed out, the ratio of clicks from paid search has declined within some categories due to reduced spending by marketers in the current economic climate. There is nothing like a recession to encourage marketers to become more creative with budgets. The increased share of organic clicks also implies that companies are getting smarter about optimizing their websites to take advantage of organic search results and these SEO efforts are working. Additionally, the increased popularity of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, along with blogs and video, are sites & pages that index quickly within search engines and result in higher organic results.

Posted by Heather Dougherty a

Google Friendly Business Descriptions

Business Descriptions

When writing a winning business description, there are a few main points to keep in mind:

• Your company’s name should appear 3 - 4 times within the description. This helps optimise your listing for search engines and increases the chances that potential customers will find your business.
• It should also refer specifically to your business’ key product or service offerings.
• The description must also be informative enough that people are attracted deeper into your company’s listing, mentioning things like how long your business has been in operation.
• The length of your business’ description should be between 50 and 200 words.

Example: Joe’s Plumbing Tools

Joe’s Plumbing Tools has been a recognized name in the Chicago plumbing industry for over 20 years. Joe’s Plumbing Tools carry a range of plumbing tools to suit every plumbing task great or small. The Joe’s Plumbing Tools range includes industry renowned plumbing tools from leading manufacturers including Pump ‘n’ Save and Drillz. Joe’s Plumbing Tools supply a range of pumps, fittings, hydraulic wrenches and pipes to suit every budget.

Maryland Internet Advertising

Getting PageRank Without Getting Links

by rustybrick

The discussion was started by a webmaster who asked, how can his page have a PageRank score of four, when Google webmaster tools reports the page has zero links? The obvious answer is that Google is not reporting all the links yet and it is very possible the page has links, but just not being reported yet. But that might not be the full answer.

If you've just stumbled onto this RSS feed and remember to subscribe to Local Organic Search Ranking via Email to ensure you can enjoy the latest post(s).

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, feels that Google gives "mom and pop" sites an artificial PageRank boost, in some cases. Let me quote Tedster:

My assumption is that this unusual PR boost is one of the ways that Google helps "mom and pop" sites compete - something that Matt Cutts made a side comment about on his blog a few years ago. He never said WHAT Google does specifically, only that they do a few things.
It seems like many top names in the thread believe in this "artificial PageRank boost." The question is, what is the artificial part? Is it the score shown, how the score is made up, or how Google sees the page in terms of trust and popularity?

In any event, do you believe in the artificial PageRank boost? Take the poll below:

Is There a Google Artificial PageRank Boost?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your web site in order to increase natural search engine traffic. Proper SEO can be time consuming, complex, and costly... that is if you don't shop around.

Frederick Web Promotions has a sterling record: 100% of all our clients have Multiple Top Ten Organic Search Rankings, and we charge a fraction of what the other Maryland Internet Advertising firms charge.

It's been said that 90% of all Google Searchers and more than 90% of all other searchers will not click past the first set of search results. Why is that?

If Google thinks you're important enough to be listed in the top 10, that's good enough for most people. People KNOW that the 'sponsored' listings are paid advertising. The public operates under the assumption that Google is selecting the MOST important websites to be #1, #2 and so on.

It's not widely known that a well executed search engine optimization campaign can manipulate who gets to be #1

A prospective client trusts the organic results

What is meant by "Organic Search Results"?

It almost sounds edible doesn't it?

The definition of Organic Search Results is the search term results returned by a search engine that are derived from what they search engine itself thinks is important as opposed to returning paid listings or advertisements.

If you've just stumbled onto this RSS feed and remember to subscribe to Local Organic Search Ranking via Email to ensure you can enjoy the latest post(s).

You type a keyword into a search engine and the search engine tells you what it thinks is the most important website regarding that search term. Search terms are what the search engine industry calls "keywords". 

Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than advertisements. 

Wikipedia's definition of search engine optimization uses the term "Algorithmic" as a synonym for "Organic".  What is an algorithm?

Why algorithms are necessary: an informal definition

While there is no generally accepted formal definition of "algorithm", an informal definition could be "an algorithm is a process that performs some sequence of operations." For some people, a program is only an algorithm if it stops eventually. For others, a program is only an algorithm if it stops before a given number of calculation steps.

For our purposes an algorithm is a mathematical process that stops when it decides, definitively which website gets to be Numero UNO and who is second string, third string, also ran, and filed away under 'deep six'.

Wikipedia goes on to say this: "As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines."

So optimizing a site means taking an existing site, it might be a pretty site, might be an interesting site, may or may not have state of the art graphics... but it's nowhere to be found.

Why is that?

Because the 'artist' who crafted the site didn't know the first thing about keywords nor did they take into account which part of the page the "bot" is going to "parse"... I'll bet my last paycheck the web designer thinks they're supposed to write the code for human consumption...

Wrong.

You want the site to be found I take it? 

I mean the whole purpose of the site is to get someone to buy something... and is that going to happen if the fancy site is buried deep in the search results on say "results 71 through 80"

You either write the code to please GoogleBot or you're writing it as a hobby. If the desired result is to put MONEY in the CASH REGISTER, you' re wanting to write code that pleases Google FIRST, pleasing humans comes second.

Argue with me if you want... My sites make money, their sites look pretty.

Which one do you want?

What can one do to get your site to rank higher than your competitors site... that's the $12,000 question (which is what I charge for a 6 month Search Engine Marketing Campaign by the way - $2000 per month for six months... the rest of the year there is a lower monthly maintenance fee).

RELEVANCE - that's what Google Wants

Ranking - that's what YOU want.

Google is bigger than you are... you want something from Google? 

I thought so... give Google What IT wants and Google can make you rich.

Anything that can be abused... will be (can't remember where I heard that first, wish I could claim it as my own quote). Everybody thinks the job of an SEO guy is to trick Google.  So many people in marketing are under the foolish notion that our job is to 'get away with' getting at the top of Google without having to pay to get at the top.

Every business person on the planet wants their product to outsell everybody else's product. 

They don't' give a rats a** about any body else but themselves.

What's in it for them? is their axiom.

They've got the cart before the horse!

Think about this carefully: What does Google Want?

more coming, stay tuned