How Internet search works

Understanding how Internet search works is the key to unlocking the power of natural search traffic achieved for ranking on page one of the search results for search phrases related to the products and services your business sells or the problems they solve.


Internet search is kind of like the Duey Decimal System of the Internet

Anybody that’s ever used he Internet is well acquainted with the concept of search engines. Search engines are to the Internet as the Dewey Decimal System is to any public library. Search engines provide us the free mechanism to find a virtual needle in a global haystack. While Internet users use search engines on a daily basis, they often take for granted the very critical task that they perform and the value that they add to our Internet experience. Whether it’s searching for information to perform a task, making a purchase from the convenience of our home or from our mobile phone on the go or just getting to a particular destination online, search engines get us there.

As an Internet marketer, search engine marketing is one of the most important tools we have at our disposal. In particular, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the discipline of ensuring client content shows up on the first page of search results for searches related to a business’s product or services or the problems they solve. This is sometimes referred to as driving natural search traffic to a website, which can have a great ROI (Return On Investment) as there is no incremental cost for each user that comes to your website via clicking on organic (non-paid) search results. Understanding how Internet search works will give us hints on how to perform SEO more effectively.

When you think about it for a moment, what search engines do and how fast they do it is really amazing. For instance, in sub-second response time, search engines search through their index of hundreds of billions or even trillions of web pages available on the Internet to find those few references that are most relevant to your particular search. That includes informational searches such as how to change a tire on automobile, transactional searches such as purchasing an electronic device over the Internet or navigational search, using a search to locate a particular company and branded website.

In the brief (3 min. and 15 second) YouTube video below, Matt Cutts, lead Engineer in charge of Google’s web search quality regarding spam, describes how search works in terms that most Internet marketers and users can understand. Obviously, the devil is always in the details and for those engineers with the time an inclination, much more hints can be found in the Google public patent filings.

Google is by far the most used search engine in the US with nearly 2/3 of the US search market share. Other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! which is powered by Bing and others work in a manner similar to Google. Understanding how Google uses over 200 factors to determine relevancy and which factors are most important, will prepare an Internet marketer to think about how to create, edit and optimize web pages so that Google understands the content and can score its relevancy high relative to related search terms. The business goal is for Google, Yahoo!, Bing (insert your search engine of choice here) to return a reference to that page in the first page of the search results, which as many already know from experience, is often as far as many of us look before trying another search. That’s why being on the first page of the search results for phrases relative to our business is the holy grail from a search engine marketing standpoint, especially if when we don’t have to bid funds for the right for our link to show up there and pay for each incremental click and resulting visit to our webpage.

Hopefully this video has provided some insights into how search engines work and the role that they play in the Internet experience. If you found value in this post, please like eBiz ROI on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ebizroi (or click like button directly below) and Follow eBiz ROI on Twitter @eBizROI (or click the Twitter follow button directly below) to stay connected to the Terrific Time for Traffic series and other quality content for growing your business online while maximizing marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

About

Rick Noel is an experienced digital marketer enabling businesses and organizations to grow through the Internet, while maximizing marketing ROI (Return On Investment). Rick is the CEO and Co-Founder of eBiz ROI, Inc., a full-service digital marketing agency located in Ballston Lake, NY.

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