All Entries in the "MSN" Category

Search Engine Statistics

You read so many different statistics on search engines it is difficult to know what to believe. You have people say that more than 60% of people on the web use google to find what they are searching for. Then you read another study that says only 49% of Internet users use a search engine at all. Other stats tell you that one-word phrases are better while some say 2 word phrases are better. So what is the truth?

According to OneStat.com;

OneStat.com ( www.onestat.com ), the number one provider of real-time intelligence web analytics, today reported that most people use 2 word phrases in search engines. Of all the search phrases world wide, 32.58 percent of the people use 2 word phrases, 25.61 percent use 3 word phrases and 19.02 percent use 1 word phrase. More and more people use 3 word phrases instead of 1 word phrase. The global usage of 2 word phrases has increased with 3.36 percent from 29.22 percent to 32.58 percent since April 2003. The use of 1 word phrase has decreased with 5.74 percent from 24.76 percent to 19.02 percent.

The 7 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:

1. 2 word phrases 32.58%
2. 3 word phrase 25.61%
3. 1 word phrases 19.02%
4. 4 word phrases 12.83%
5. 5 word phrases 5.64%
6. 6 word phrases 2.32%
7. 7 word phrases 0.98%

Longtail keywords are getting more and more percentage of searches which has been confirmed by a lot of SEO Bloggers recently as well. Add that to the fact that longtail searches mean more targeted traffic and more leads or sales and you know how to target your seo efforts in a more productive way. Example; The term “insurance” will have a lower conversion percentage than “insurance qoute”. The person typing the longer phrase is looking to get a quote and buy insurance.

Now as to how many people use search engines when trying to find a website to make a purchase, look at this chart.

41% of consumers use a search engine when searching for something they want to buy. So if Google has 60% of all searches performed by search engine users, that is about 25% of Internet users who buy something online.

You need to pay attention to all of the ways you can get traffic to your website, not just Google. The chart also does not account for how many people find websites and blogs through social networking websites.

If twitter, digg, delicious, stumbleupon, facebook and others have millions of users, then that means a lot of websites or blogs are “discovered” through social bookmarking. Anyone know a study that compares how many people find websites through social networking vs. search engines?

MSN BrowserRank

MSN BrowserRank is just the beginiing. This is something I have been talking to clients about and working on for quite some time now. The future of search rankings will include the amount of time spent on your website and individual web pages. The links that are clicked on the most in your site will also be part of ranking those pages.

All three engines have been using a variation of link analysis to determine what’s relevant and what gets ranked into their databases. But the news of the week has been 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.

Google Optimization and Social Bookmarking

Google Optimization and Search Engine Optimization

There is SEO or search engine optimization and there is Google Optimization. There is a big difference between the two. Matt Cutts is a really smart guy and a lot of people read his blog. When interviewed the stories have titles like “Matt Cutts on SEO”. But in reality, he works for Google and the story should read “Matt Cutts on Google Optimization”.

We all know that more searches are performed at Google than any other search engine or portal. But a good SEO Professional will tell you that putting all of your eggs into just one basket is a bad idea, even if the basket is really big.

SEO is more than just optimizing your website for the Google Search Engine. You want traffic from multiple sources, not just one. Can you survive on just Google traffic alone? Yes. You can survive on bread and water for awhile too, but do you want to?

MSN Traffic converts higher for some websites than Google Traffic does and vice versa. Yahoo traffic converts higher than either one of those for some products and services. Then there is Ask, AOL, Dogpile, Alta Vista, and many others out there. Some are just compilations of results from other search engines and some have their own way of rankling sites. You want traffic coming in from all of them, not just Google.

You can also get quality traffic from email marketing, advertising on websites that target the same audience as you, press releases, article marketing, web directory submissions, and more. All of these sources can bring you more traffic and sales.

Number of Searches VS Number of People

On SEO Blogs and Forums you see people arguing that Google has 60% or 70% or 80% of the traffic and the numbers they use change with each post they make. There is a huge problem with their numbers.

More experienced Internet users generally use Google, while newer users tend to use MSN, Yahoo, or AOL. How do I know? When you bought your last new computer, what was the default home page? More than likely it was MSN. Yahoo seems to become many people’s home page as well because of their advertising and marketing strategies combined with Yahoo Chat and Yahoo Mail. If the user chose AOL as their internet service provide as millions of people have, then AOL becomes their home page.

Newer users do not tend to change their home page as much as you might think. Many don’t even know they can or know how to do it. So they use the search feature found on their home page.

Now add to that, more experienced users search more times per day than less experienced users. SEO Persons, Web Designers, Marketers, and other Techies do as many as 20-30 searches or more per day. Researchers, Writers, Teachers, Professors, and others may even search more times than that per day.

Newbies or part time Internet users would consider 10 searches in one day a lot. Many of them likely search way less times than that per day.

So Google has, well let’s say, 70% of all searches done in search engines. But each person who uses Google searches an average of 10 times per day to use a low figure.

Yahoo has about 15% of the searches made each day. Let’s say their users search an average of 5 times per day.

Now let’s take a sampling of 100,000 searches. Many more than that are done each day, it’s just a round figure to work with. 70,000 of those made at Google and 15,000 of those made at yahoo. That would mean the 70,000 searches at Google were performed by 7,000 people. The 15,000 searches at yahoo would represent 3,000 people. So Google would have 2 1/3 more people searching than yahoo.

But when you say 70% of the searches vs. 15% of the searches, it makes it sound like Google represents 4 2/3 more people than yahoo. The Number of searches vs. the number of actual people searching tells two completely different stories.

Traffic from other websites, web directories, article marketing, press releases, smaller search engines and directories, and more are not counted when people talk about these percentages either. This means if you factor in all of the other traffic sources, Google becomes even smaller in terms of actual number of people.

What About Social Bookmarking?

Now if you want to really talk about percentages, the growth of social bookmarking and social networking has really changed the numbers. Many people today find what they are looking for at social bookmarking websites and for many these sites are now their home page.

Millions of people are using Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Mixx, Sphinn, Facebook, UAN.ME, Blog Catalog, Bloglines, and other Social Networking and Blog Search Websites

So why is it when people compare searches done at Google, msn, and yahoo, don’t they include the number of searches done at social bookmarking sites in the equation?

The Internet is evolving. Social Bookmarking is becoming the primary source for information for millions of users.

I’ll close this by saying once again; do not gamble all of your resources on just one source of traffic. Do not ignore Google because more searches are done there than any other search portal, but diversify your SEO Strategy to combine all of the different sources of traffic if you want to guarantee the stability of your online business.