Question
Boy, can I attest to THAT!
Guiltily admitting that even I got caught up there for a bit in the search engine placement frenzied. Hopefully, this reprint will 'enlighten' and 'de-stress' you during this holiday season!
As a member of several search engine optimization forums, I have recently noticed (especially since Yahoo recently decided to try their hand at competing with Google) that the stress level of many webmasters has gone way up. This applies not only to webmasters involved in Internet-based home businesses, but to webmasters in general. Additionally, it seems that many people that are in the business of search engine optimization (SEO) are, with good reason, going completely bonkers. As Google came on the scene in 1998 and quickly dominated the search business, website optimization became largely a game of shooting at a single target, namely, pleasing Google...for all intents and purposes, Google became the "800 pound gorilla" of the search engine business.
Since the advent of search engines (particularly Google) spawned the whole SEO business, I guess its only fair that the search engine industry can once again turn the SEO business on its ear, and it seems now to be sort of a cat and mouse (not desktop) relationship that can get really interesting as we move forward.
Not only are there now several viable players (most notably Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves) in the search engine business, but they are all adopting different and frequently changing algorithms for determining the ranking positions for websites.
The current game is that webmasters are trying to figure out how the various search engines perform the rankings and, on the flip side, the search engines are striving to be unpredictable to those webmasters and SEO firms.
For those people using websites to promote home-based businesses, it can be stressful constantly trying to determine "what the search engines want" and agonizing over every downward fluctuation in rankings that their website may experience.
Looking forward in time, I think we can expect that rankings will fluctuate frequently and will not be at all consistent from one search engine to another. It will be quite common that for a particular search term a website might suffer a drop in position ranking for search engine "A" and an increase position ranking for search engine "B" at essentially the same point in time.
Rather than stressing out over every position ranking "wiggle", a better approach might be to just focus on "what do visitors to my site want?". The search engines are striving to give their users a quality (relevant) search experience and if you are focused in giving visitors to your website what they are looking for, these paths will meet somewhere down the road.
You can save yourself alot of consternation by focusing upon the needs of the website visitors you are seeking to attract, rather than chasing the frequently changing ranking algorithms of several search engines. Focus on a single target instead of chasing several moving targets at the same time.
This article pertains to natural searches only, as paid search engine advertising is a completely different situation.
by Kirk Bannerman
Answer
I focus on Google and let the rest fall where they may. However I have excellent placement on Yahoo and MSN. So I say focus on the big guy.
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Out of curiousity. Why do the search engines used to access ebay generally show "other" rather than lets say Google, or Yahoo or the other biggies?
When I used the Store Manager feature on ebay stores, it shows the other engines as more dense that ebay. Doesn't ebay consider itself a search engine per se?
Ok, I admit. I know nothing about ranking! ...but trying is better than sitting on my hands.
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Kathleen Hi,
you are so right in what you say. Anyone building a website should forget about the search engines and do what is right for the visitors, which , funny enough is exactly the same as what the search engines want.
The only considerations to the search engines should be to the technical aspects, eg appreciate that no search engines bar Google can follow links to pages from within javascript menus and flash files. You can easily overcome this problem by having plain text links anyhow, and using the no script facility to add your links.
The main points on a website to consider have to be ease of use, (called usability). This covers such things as a clear navigation sytem (how many times have we hit a page and though 'what now'?) a clear navigation system will keep visitors on your site longer and make them more likely to buy.
Navigation structure, a clear navigation structure is also crucial for visitors. Group your pages into logical groups, and give them a master page for the group where you can access all the pages easily, and link back to that master page from all the pages in the group so people can get back to find the other stuff easily.
Give clear and no waffle information about the topic of each page, breaking down multiple topics into different pages. Make sure you have a real page title. 'DJ EVANS HOME PAGE' tells you nothing, 'Hand made reproduction oak dining furniture from DJ Evans' tells you all you need to knowto make a decision on which page to visit. Keep in mind that your pag title is what the search engines display.
The wierd thing is, that if you do all that stuff that visitors like, then you are well on your way to having the basics of SEO covered. SEO is such a poor description, and all top SEO's know all to well that usability and conversion of visitors is what makes a site work, like they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink (unless you remove the blinkers and let them see how clear, bright and cool it all looks)
Cobalt lady, funny enough ALL the search engines want the same thing, and if you do ok on Yahoo! & MSN then you will do ok on Google provided you have enough links pointing back to your site.
Empires not sure what your asking sorry I am having a particularly stupid day today lol Google is by far the biggest referrer of search traffic, despite it no longer having the same market share as it used to since Yahoo switched to Yahoo search in march (up until then it used the google index) Google is delivering about 70-80% of traffic to most websites, odd I know considering it doesnt have even 50% of the search volume. Shopping sites are different though as Froogle is a biggie in the world of shopping search.