Top 10 Results On Search Engines. What Difference Do They Make?
April 17, 2008 
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.
Posted in Analytics, Blogging, SEO, Web Master Tips
content rss
Absolutely! SEO is all about the "O"- optimization! that is being clear to dumb bots what the topic is so it has the best chances of indexing it correctly.
Matt,
Sorry for having your in moderation. Are you posting as "verified'?
Check out the eye tracking research at www.enquiroresearch.com, the Google Golden Triangle study in particular.
You're absolutely right, that once you fall of the first page you're kind of toast if it's not a high traffic keyword.
Many people do the SEO only concentrate on the SERP. I do agreed that SEPR might bring you the trafic but not the quality link
This is so true, and will remain relevant for a long time. If you are redesigning your website you should definitely find a designer who is at least a little keen on SEO. I have been looking into this lately and I couldn't agree more with the post. Also, right now sites built using Flash, while they may look really cool, are not really able to be read by the search engines. A little research can really help your cause. Thanks also for the analytics tool!
Kelli (???)
Thanks for stopping by. I can't agree more with you regarding Flash designs. While you can take extra steps to make a Flash website SEO friendly, I think it's just unnecessary. Specially with the abundance of Content Management Systems out there.
If you have time take a look at Hittail.com as well I have been using it for last two years with a great success.
Again, thanks for stopping by.
Vlad,
thanks for the tip on HitTail- it looks like it could be a good tool, and I'm always looking for ways to help my site stay relevant on the search engines!
Kelli,
I use paid version of Hittail, but I believe that they may still have a free
version. I would advise you to star with that.
I think you have positioned your website well, if I had to offer you a
suggestion it would be to start a BLOG - coincidently it is also acronym to
Better Listings On Google... :)
I've always told people this! Great post! Furthermore, if you can claim a spot in the top 3 listings, you will get 50% more clicks.
Jeff,
I think it is also important to understand that one should target the "long tale" keywords to begin with.
Thanks for stopping by.