Chapter 1

Putting Search Engines in Context

IN THIS CHAPTER

Identifying search engine users

Discovering why people use search engines

Pinpointing elements for getting high keyword rankings

Defining relationships between search engines

The Internet offers a world of information, both good and bad. Almost anything a person could want is merely a few taps on a screen or a couple clicks of a mouse away. A good rule of thumb for the Internet is that if you want to know about something or purchase something, there’s probably already a website just for that. The catch is actually finding it. This is what brings you to this book. You have a website. You have hired what you hope is a crack team of designers and have unleashed your slick, shiny, new site upon the web, ready to start making money. However, there is a bit of a problem: Nobody knows that your site exists. How will people find your website? The most common way that new visitors will find your site is through a search engine. A search engine is a web application designed to hunt for specific keywords and group them according to relevance. It used to be, in the stone age of the 1990s, that most websites were found via directories or word-of-mouth. Somebody linked to your website from his website, or maybe somebody posted about it on one of his newsgroups, and people found their way to you. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing were created to cut out the middleman and bring your user to you with little hassle and fuss.

In this chapter, we show you how to find your audience by giving you the tools to differentiate between types of users, helping you sort out search engines, identifying the necessary elements to make your site prominent in those engines, and giving you an insider look at how all the search engines work together.

Identifying Search Engine Users

Who is using search engines? Well, everyone. A significant amount of all visitor traffic to websites comes from search engines. Unless you are a household name like eBay or Amazon.com, chances are people won’t know where you are unless they turn to a search engine and hunt you down. In fact, even the big brands get most of their traffic from search engines. Search engines are the biggest driver of traffic on the web, and their influence only continues to grow.

But although search engines drive traffic to websites, you must remember that your website is only one of a half trillion websites out there. Chances are, if someone does a search, even for a product that you sell, your website won’t automatically pop up in the first page of results. If you're lucky and the query is targeted enough, you might end up somewhere in the top 100 of the millions of results returned. That might be okay if you're only trying to share your vacation photos with your family, but if you need to sell a product, you need to appear higher in the results. In most cases, you want the number one spot on the first page because that’s the result everyone looks at and that most people click.

In the following sections, you find out a bit more about the audience available to you and how to reach them.

Figuring out how much people spend

The fact of the matter is that people spend money on the Internet in increasing numbers. It’s frightfully easy: All you need is a credit card, a computer with an Internet connection, and something that you've been thinking about buying. Revenue from e-commerce in the United States amounted to 431.6 billion U.S dollars in 2020. The Statista Digital Market Outlook estimates that by 2025, revenue will increase to 563.4 billion dollars. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/272391/us-retail-e-commerce-sales-forecast/). Combine that with the fact that researchers are projecting over 275 million online shoppers (over 80 percent of the U.S. population) by 2024 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/273957/number-of-digital-buyers-in-the-united-states/), and you’re looking at a viable means of moving your product. To put it simply, “There’s gold in them thar hills!”

So, now you need to get people to your website. In real estate, the most important thing is location, location, location. On the web, instead of having a prime piece of property, you need a high listing on the search engine results page (SERP). Your placement in these results is referred to as your ranking. You have a few options when it comes to achieving good rankings. One, you can make your page the best it can be and hope that people will find it in the section of the search results normally referred to as the organic rankings; or two, you can pay to appear in one of the advertising slots, identified on the search results page as ads. In early 2021, it was projected that by the end of the year, marketers would spend more than $455 billion on Internet ads worldwide (https://www.emarketer.com/content/worldwide-digital-ad-spending-2021).

While paying for ads is one way to get your business in front of Internet users, search engine optimization (SEO), when properly done, helps you to design your website in such a way that when a user does a search, your pages appear in the unpaid (that is, organic) results, in a top spot, you hope. Your focus in this book is finding out about SEO, but because there is some overlap, you pick up a bit of paid search marketing knowledge here and there along the way.

Knowing your demographics

In order to get the most bang for your SEO buck, you need to know the demographics of your web visitors. You need to know who’s looking for you, because you need to know how best to promote yourself. For example, if you’re selling dog sweaters, advertising in biker bars is probably not a great idea. Sure, there might be a few Billy Bob Skullcrushers with a cute little Chihuahua in need of a cashmere shrug, but statistically, your ad would probably do much better in a beauty salon. The same goes for your website in a search engine. Gender, age, and income are just a few of the metrics that you want to track in terms of identifying your audience. Search engine users include slightly more male than female users across the board. Of the major search engines, Bing attracts the smallest percentage of users over the age of 55. Search engines even feed their results into other search engines, as you can see in our handy-dandy Search Engine Relationship Chart in the section “Understanding the Search Engines: They’re a Community,” later in this chapter. Table 1-1 breaks down user demographics across the three most popular search engines for your reference.

These broad statistics are just a start. You need to know who your search engine visitors are, because demographic data helps you effectively target your desired market. This demographic distribution is often associated with search query keywords. Think of your keywords as the words that best indicate what your website content is about and what search engine visitors might use to search for what your website offers. A search engine looks for these keywords when figuring out which web pages to show on the SERP. (For an in-depth look at choosing keywords, check out Book 2, Chapter 2.) Basically, your keywords are the words searchers might use in a search query — what they type (or speak) into a search engine — or what the engine thinks the searcher intended to search for. If you are searching for something like information on customizing classic cars, for example, you might type [classic custom cars] into the search field. (Note: Throughout the book, we use square brackets to show the search query. You don’t actually type the brackets into the search field.) Figure 1-1 displays a typical search engine results page for the query [classic custom cars].

TABLE 1-1 User Demographics Across Major Search Engines

For the month of July 2013 (via Compete.com)

Simply put, the search engine goes to work combing its index for web pages about these keywords and returns with the results it thinks will best satisfy you. As a website creator, therefore, if you have a...