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Targeted Website Traffic

Most Internet related businesses want targeted website traffic that results in sales. One might ask how many consumers really use the Internet and do they in fact buy over the Internet. If the consumer does not buy on the Internet, do they make a purchase decision based on information they found on the Internet? The research findings on these questions are startling!

Internet Research Statistics

There are over 205 million Internet users in the US market alone. (Internet World Stats, 2006) The Northwest Region (Oregon and Washington) has the highest adult Internet access in the nation. (Pew Research Center, December, 2002) Yellow page advertising and other directories are losing readership each year to the Internet. Many yellow page directories have turned to the Internet to boost their eroding market share. (The Kelsey Group) Around 85% of Internet website traffic originates from the major search engines. (Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998)Recent studies of the home buying process found that 70 to 80% of home buyers begin their search for a property through the Internet. (National Association of Realtors and Google, 2007) This figure is expected to continue to grow. Visit our Internet Statistics page for more interesting research findings.

Search Engine Visibility Statistics

A joint study of search engine results pages found that the first three positions of organic search results received 100% visibility. All organic results found without scrolling down received above 85% visibility. Visibility fell from 60% to 20% after scrolling down the page. For sponsored advertisements, top-of-the-page listings received 80 to 100% visibility while side listings provided only 50% to 10% visibility. (Enquiro, Did-it and Eyetools, 2005) Seventy-five percent of Internet search engine users never look beyond the first page search results. Ninety percent do not look beyond the first three pages of search results. More than 70% of search engine click-throughs come from organic listings rather than Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Sponsored and Featured result listings. (Forrester Research, 2000) In conclusion, although the paid search results have great visibility, organic search results have even higher visibility and more than double the click-through rate for the best return on investment. (Organic results are the non-paid listings the search engines display as search results. Sponsored and Featured listings are paid listings or advertisements often ignored by Internet consumers.)

Internet Marketing = Target Marketing

The Internet is a growing media that has captured a large market share of media visibility. Websites that achieve first page rankings on the search engines obtain extremely high visibility. Because search engine users click on websites that meet their own search criteria, the resulting highly, targeted web traffic is beneficial to both the web searcher and the e-Commerce business. Websites that achieve free high organic search results have more web traffic than websites who pay to get on the search engine's first page results. Achieving high ranking first page results occurs with good web page content, targeted keywords, error-free code, etc--all things that make your website a better place to visit. More about e-Commerce marketing can be found at our Internet Marketing page.

Search Engine Optimization

How do the search engines rank? Google with 77% market share and Yahoo with 12.4% combine to command 89% of the search engine market. MSN posts nearly a 6% market share. (Net Applications, December, 2007, see attached chart) More important than where the search engines rank is how they rank websites. A website with a high rank makes it to the first page of the search results. Getting to the first page means being visible on the Internet. Anything less than a listing on the first three pages of the search results constitutes a practically invisible website to Internet users.

Website Optimization

The search engines use algorithms to evaluate the value of your website in relation to similar websites on the internet. The algorithms take many factors into consideration and score websites respectively. These factors include but are not limited to keywords, W3C validation and proper link management.

Search Engine Keywords

Keywords are an important factor for the algorithms. The algorithms rank for frequency, proximity, density and prominence. Frequency concerns the number of times the keyword appears on the page. The proximity of keywords to each other within phrases of the webpage plays a role. Keyword density pertains to measuring the percentage of times a keyword shows up in a specific part of the web page such as the title, heading, anchors and body text in relation to all other words in the same area. Prominence refers to the position of the keywords on the page top, body and the bottom.

Search Engine Friendly

Another important algorithm factor is compliance with W3C rules. Websites that are not "spider" or "robot" friendly receive lower rankings due to code errors and violations that make it harder for the spiders to evaluate a website. "Spiders" are software programs that scan the World Wide Web (www) and build a database based on the visited websites. When a consumer types a keyword into the search engine and presses "enter", the engine searches its database for the websites that most closely matches the keyword. Then the search engine lists the websites in rank order that best matches and provides the best content for the keyword. However, wise e-Commerce businesses should market their website first to the consumer and then to the search engines. What is good for the consumer will generally be well received by the search engines. The focus should always be user-friendly first, search engine-friendly second.

Link Management

Link management has become another very important algorithm factor if not the most important factor today. A link to a website counts like a vote for the search engine algorithms. It is not merely how many incoming links a website has but the quality and relevancy of those links. Quality is largely measured by the content found on the web pages and their relevancy to the keywords listed on the linked site. In other words, some votes count significantly more than others. Similar to when a celebrity endorses a presidential candidate, that endorsement or vote can be a powerful persuader to many other voters if the character of the celebrity is above reproach. Therefore, the number of votes and the quality of the voters (incoming links) factor in determining the rank for the receiving website. Establishing links with irrelevant websites does little good for your website visitors or for the search engine spiders.

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