Promotion Tip:
Helping Searchers Search

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

Think of all the time and effort you expend to create good Web page content and promote it to search engines. The effort pays off when your site sits at the top of the rankings for your targeted keyword phrase. But even a top rank doesn't guarantee success unless you've also considered the weakest link in the promotion chain: the searchers!

You can't teach them to search more effectively, but you can use page content to compensate.

Most Searchers Don't Search Very Well

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen notes that a 1997 study of Web usage found that only 60% of users could complete requested tasks such as searching for and booking an online vacation. In a 2004 reprise of the study, the success rate had rocketed up to a whopping 66% - that's less than a 1% per year increase!

The same 2004 study found that users are relatively inept when it comes to searching for information online. Nielsen comments that any increase is probably due to better search engine technology, not increased searching skills:

Many visitors don't understand the importance of an exact query and probably seriously underestimate the vast size of the Web. Although Google helpfully reminds them after each query:

"Now searching 4,685,301,826 Web pages."

With those numbers in mind, just what is a frustrated webmaster - or searcher - to do? You have to know how searchers think and how they behave when looking for specifics online.

The Power Of Quotation Marks

Successful keyword selection is almost an exercise in mind reading. You have to put yourself in the place of the searcher. Sometimes that's hard because you're probably far more experienced in extracting data and understand the power of search engines advanced search options.

"Advanced search options" may sound, well, advanced, but we mean nothing more complicated than narrowing the search by adding quotation marks around the keyword phrase or using Boolean operators.

Quotation marks, in particular, can dramatically alter search results because many search engines automatically filter out common words like "in" "and" "or" and "the." Unless the search query is enclosed in quotation marks, those common words are removed before the database search takes place.

Note: don't confuse common words with the more deadly "stop words" which can get you kicked out of the search database entirely!

Here are some examples that show how a slightly different search query can dramatically change the total number of search results:

What's going on? You're asking a different question when you add the quotation marks. The search engine takes this question and converts it into a database query:

"Which Web pages contain the words "home" AND "canning" AND "recipes?"

This is a better way to ask for a search:

"Which Web pages contain the phrase 'home canning recipes' where all three words appear in that exact order?"

That's such a powerful search function that it's hard to believe that only about 3% of searchers actually use it. Unfortunately, many average searchers aren't interested in learning how to use the search engine better: they just want good results quickly.

Keyword Proximity: Mimicking Advanced Search

Since you have little chance of educating individual searchers on advanced search functions, you have to create page content that does the work for them.

When a query is entered into a search engine, the engine looks at the search term, filters out the common words, and then queries the database. That sounds pretty simple, but there's a lot more happening in the background.

When the database returns the search results, the ranking algorithm then determines page relevancy based on a number of factors including: keyword density, link popularity, page structure, and keyword proximity.

So what happens when a searcher enters this phrase without quotation marks?

Algorithms determine keyword proximity by looking at the words entered in the search box and measuring how closely they appear on the Web page. Pages that actually contain the exact phrase "home canning recipes" will rank marginally higher in keyword relevancy than pages that contain all three words, but in a slightly different order and with intervening words:

These last three phrases mean much the same thing and contain all three search terms, but their proximity score would be lower than the first phrase which uses the words in the same order as the search term.

Until now, you may have only written page content with an eye towards keyword density (the number of times the keyword phrases are used), but keyword proximity is also important. It helps you compensate for searchers who just aren't knowledgeable or are in too much of a hurry to narrow their searches.

No Guarantees With A Top Rank

And for those impatient visitors, page rank matters! Nielsen observed that 51% of searchers never looked past the first page of search results and commented that:

"If it is beyond the first page, it is as if it did not exist."

But a top page rank doesn't always mean lots of traffic. It's easy to get a top rank with an obscure phrase that searchers never consider:

A check with the keyword popularity tool bundled with Search Engine Power Pack quickly reveals that it might be relatively easy to attain a high rank on these phrases. But why bother?

Selecting keywords, optimizing your pages, and submitting them to search engines can be a daunting task. Remove some of the guesswork and drudgery by using Search Engine Power Pack. It contains a full-suite of search engine optimization tools that help select keywords, avoid spam techniques, measure keyword density, and submit your site to many of the top search engines.