Site promotion is essential to the
success of any web site. Although you have paid for
an eye catching and functional site, if no one can
find it, all that cost and work is for not. In addition,
statistics have shown that if you are not ranked in
the top 50 (usually the first 5 pages) on a search engine,
then the likelihood of your site being viewed is minimal.
According to KeyWordRanking.com,
search engines bring 85% of site traffic:
Share Of Searches: July 2006
The chart below shows the percentage of online
searches done by US home and work web surfers
in March 2005 that were performed at a particular
search engine. Internal site searches, such as
those to find material within a particular web
site, are not counted in these totals. The activity
at more than 60 search sites makes up the total
search volume upon which percentages are based.
http://searchenginewatch.com/reports
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U.S. Core Search Engines by Search Share, September 2008 |
In June, Google Sites retained its lead in the U.S. core
search market capturing 61.5 percent of the searches conducted, down slightly
from 61.8 percent in May. Google was followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.9 percent, up
from 20.6 percent in May), Microsoft Sites (9.2 percent, up from 8.5 percent in
May), Ask Network (4.3 percent), and AOL LLC (4.1 percent). |
Core Search Entity |
May-08 |
Jun-08 |
Point Change |
Google sites |
61.8% |
61.5% |
-0.3 |
Yahoo sites |
20.6% |
20.9% |
0.3 |
Microsoft sites |
8.5% |
9.2% |
0.7 |
Ask Network |
4.5% |
4.3% |
-0.2 |
AOL LLC |
4.5% |
4.1% |
-0.4 |
Total core search |
100.0 |
100.0 |
0.0 |
* Based on the five major search
engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for
mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the
core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search
numbers |
Source: comScore, 2007 |
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Further, of the hundreds of search engine sites out
there, only 4 major engines make up 90% of the searches
done by web surfers, they are Google, Yahoo, MSN
and AOL.
Think of your site as a building with
many entrances, the front door, the back door and the
windows. Yes, we would like for the viewer to enter
through the index page the front door, but the primary
objective is to get the viewer to your site, whether
it's the index page, home page or any number of other
pages. Entry is the primary objective and happens only
if your site is index high on the search engines preferably
within the top 50 spots.
In the industry, preparing a site for submission and
then developing a program for web site page submission
is sometimes rolled up into one term, SEO or Search
Engine Optimization. SEO is the planed design of a site
making it search engine friendly and then the scheduled
submission of each page of a site.
What exactly is search engine friendly? Back in the
early days of the world wide web (not so many years
ago) the primary tool for search engine placement was
the META information, HTML code placed in the head portion
of a page which can’t seen by the viewer unless
they know how to view the source code. These META tags,
(title, description and tags) were read by the search
engine robots and spiders and placed in a database along
with the URL page.
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