Top 10 Results On Search Engines. What Difference Do They Make?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:44:27 +0000

Today many people believe that search engine optimization is a waste of time. I think it is based on misunderstanding of what SEO really is. This misunderstanding is often a result of negative users experience as far as relevancy of the search results are concerned. If you practice SEO in an attempt to manipulate search result to get to the top at any cost, you are very short sighted.

I belong to a group of people who believe that SEO can be very useful. I am mindful of SEO every time I write a new post, trying to provide useful and relevant content to the user. I don’t think I am cheating my way to the top of the search engine results. Every time I write an article, I want it to come up in top 10 results for a keyword or set of keywords.

Why 10 top results? Most of the internet users using search engines do not change the default settings and, after submitting a query, each page produces 10 search results. The top 10 search results across the search engines receive anywhere from 70% to 95% or more of all clicks.

I have recently discovered 103bees (HT: ProBlogger). 103bees is a very good analytics tool, which every blogger should use. It helped me to visualize the distribution of click over the keywords used to find this blog. One need thing about 103bees, that it also reports what position of the search results your website was found at. Take a look at the results for this blog of last few days:

As you can see, the likelihood of user ending up visiting your website if it found among top 10 results is 7+ times more than if your website was found on the second page (results 11-20).

When creating new content for your blog or website, you should be mindful of good SEO practices. It can produce impressive results. Similar Posts:

Should You “Quantify” Your Website With Quancast?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:12:47 +0000

It has been few months since this website was “quantified” on qunatcast.com. There are some interesting and surprising statistics about this blog. But first things first. What is Quantcast what does it mean to be quantified?

Quancast is an internet rating service. In other words they provide data about traffic to the websites. Currently they have over rated over 20 millions websites. They get their data? It’s done by estimates (please do not ask me how they do it) or by direct measurements. When you visit the Quantcast.com you will notice that the good number of websites are “quantified”. Those are the websites that are being measured directly. And yes I recommend you to quantify your site. It’s very simple to register, and all you need to do to quantify your website is to place a peace of code into the template of your website or blog, similar of what you do with the code from Google Analytics.

Since this blog is hardly known by any one, it took about two months for Quantcast to report demographic data of the visors to this website. This demographic data about visitors to this website was the main reason I ever registered with Qunatcast.

Here are just few snapshots.

Gender and Age Of Go Beyond MLS Visitors
I thought that more women are visiting my blog. The real estate industry is dominated by women. Even when I was active in the real estate, out of 15 agents in our office there were only 5 men. Since real estate agents is my target audience I naturally thought that most of my visitors are women.

The age of the visitors completely surprised me. I belong in the 25-34 age group so I though my visitors would be of the same age. I turns out my site is more popular among 55-64 age group. This of course is very humbling to know that more experienced people find my blog interesting enough to visit.

Household Income and Ethnicity of Go Beyond MLS Visitors

I had really no expectation about these statistics. Still don’t know if this knowledge will have any real effect on how I develop this blog. But there you go:

Education and Children of Go Beyond MLS Visitors

Again, had no expectations whatsoever about these statistics. I guess they can be useful as far as advertising is concerned. But since the demand for advertising on my website is minimal, I will just look at it and say: “Hmm, interesting”.

So why would you want to know this sort of data about you website? I think above data can be extremely useful if you are trying to target a specific audience.

Quantcast provides some great reports on geographic location of your visitors. You can see where do your visitors come from by country, state and city. This of course can very useful for the real estate websites.

How reliable is Quancast data? I would say that the data on “qualified” websites, or directly measured websites, is right on target. But why should you believe me, try it for yourself.

You can see the entire report for my website here. If you care to share similar statistics about your blog or website, feel tree to leave a link the the comments.Similar Posts:

Go Beyond MLS » Analytics

Top 10 Results On Search Engines. What Difference Do They Make?

Should You “Quantify” Your Website With Quancast?