Hybrid Domainer

What Do People Search For ?

By: Raymond Hackney

What do people search for ?

This infographic was put together by iacquire.com and Survey Monkey. Interesting that 50 % of people clicking an ad think they are clicking an organic search result.

Courtesy of iacquire and survey monkey

Matt Cutts Answers " How Can A Legitimate Business Compete Online ?"

By: RH

Ranking being so valuable, how does a true business owner that offers a legitimate business and has a vast number of customers supposed to compete and gain the traffic deserved over those that specialize in creating traffic ?

Matt talks about not having a site that sucks and even because you are a legitimate business does not mean your site is not bad.

Matt goes into other ways to promote your business in the video and talks about the difference between the real world and the online world.

 

Google Releases "How Search Works"

By: RH

How Search Works

Google announced today a new site, How Search Works

A few things you'll find:

• An interactive, graphical explanation of Google Search
• A view into major search algorithms and features
• A 43-page document explaining how we evaluate our results
• A live slideshow of spam as we remove it
• Graphs illustrating the spam problem and how we fight it
• A list of policies that explain when we'll remove content

Check out How Search Works Here

The Evolution of the Search Engine

By: RH

The Evolution of the Search Engine

Monetate put together this look at how search has evolved over the last 20 years. They also point out the increased importance of on site search and how to make it work for you.

Courtesy of Monetate

The Five Websites That Rule The Search Landscape

By: RH

Webmasters have to be more creative daily to find more and more visitors. I was reading the report Experian did and when you look at the numbers the big boys do cast a wide net.

From the report:

Five Websites captured 20 percent of all search activity in Q4 2012, while the top 500 captured nearly 50 percent. Expansion to the top 1,000 Websites reached nearly 75 percent, highlighting the challenges for marketers to reach potential customers through search, even for those with a large Web presence.

Top five Websites to capture search clicks

Websites	Domain	Q4 2012 – share of search clicks
Facebook	www.facebook.com	8.48%
YouTube	www.youtube.com	5.55%
Yahoo!	www.yahoo.com	2.63%
Wikipedia	www.wikipedia.org	2.01%
Amazon.com	www.amazon.com	1.40%

Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise

Finding ways to leverage social media, along with laser like focus when it comes to search campaigns is needed on a daily and monthly basis to bring about gains in traffic and find customers.

You can read the whole report here.

Facebook the Top Search Term Four Years Running

By: RH

Experian released their study of the Top 1,000 search terms and Facebook topped the list again. This was the fourth straight year that Facebook was the top search term.

Facebook number 1 search term for 2012

Experian Marketing Services analyzed the top 1,000 search terms from Hitwise data for 2012 , and Facebook was the top-searched term overall in the US. This is the fourth year that the social networking Website has been the top search term overall, accounting for 4.13 percent of all searches, a 33 percent increase from 2011. Four variations of the term “facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 5.62 percent of US searches overall, a 27 percent increase from 2011.

Among the top 10 terms, the top two terms stayed the same with facebook the top search term and “youtube” ranked at number two. The search term “craigslist” moved up from the fourth spot in 2011 to the third spot in 2012. “Facebook login” was the fourth most-searched term in 2012, followed by “facebook.com” and “yahoo.” The search term “amazon” moved into the top 10 terms for the first time. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking–related terms dominated the results, accounting for 6.03 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 44 percent compared with 2011.

Of particular interest to domainers was the fact that Experian found that people continued to use the search engines to go to their favorite sites. Its very interesting that someone searches for Facebook on Google and then clicks the search result to log in to Facebook.

“Navigational searches continue to dominate the top search results as users continue to visit their favorite sites via search engines instead of directly entering a web address into their browsers URL bar,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Experian Marketing Services. “Single-word searches grew 16 percent in 2012 as a result of continued reliance on search engine’s suggested results. Other top 2012 searches reflected the ongoing infatuation with celebrities online.”

Read the whole article here

Shoppers Rely On Local Search Results

By: RH

Domainers and developers tend to fall in love and then sometimes fall out of love with geo local domains. Some have said their websites were affected by the Google EMD update and others have stayed strong in the search engines.

Shoppers are increasingly turning to the web, according to comScore's 5th Annual Local Search Usage Study. While this may not be a revolutionary finding in 2012, the study did make a surprising discovery: shoppers, especially those equipped with mobile devices, are actually utilizing local search and not merely purchasing online. That's right; shoppers are seeking to buy in-store, locally. This means it is vital for small retailers to appear in local search. Find out just how important this is to consumers and businesses.

Courtesy of Milo.com

SEO Link Building Q&A with an Ex-Google Webspam Team Member

By: RH

Search Engine Journal did an interview with a gentleman who used to work for the Google Webspam team that is run by Matt Cutts.

The interview gives a pretty good look into what Google considers spam, how to fix your site if its been demoted by Google, and what things to avoid.

The question and answer most interesting to me from the article was:

7. What are some of the biggest misconceptions or myths you’ve seen about “bad links” and link profile penalties in the SEO community? 

I think I could write a book about this topic! SEO is an unprotected title and anyone can call him or herself one. The result of this is that there are almost as many opinions as there are SEOs. Some of the biggest misconceptions that I have seen out there include; “directories are altogether bad” or “anything that is below a certain PR is considered spammy by Google”, I see a lot of people panicking and cutting off the head to cure the headache due to lack of knowledge. The most dangerous one of all I would consider to be the opinion that if an automated link building scheme is expensive, it must be good. Google has made it very clear that it wants links to be a sign of a real reason to link, an AUTHENTIC vote of confidence if you will. Anything that is paid for, is not considered quality by Google and participating in it puts your site at risk!

Read the whole SearchEngineJournal.com article here

 

What Startups Need to Know About SEO and Domain Names

By: RH

Danny Sullivan did this quick 1 minute video about domain names and SEO. He gives a quick mention about the new tlds and how search will treat them.

This is a quick little video that you may be able to use in your sales pitch when someone is giving you a line about SEO or which domain to pick.

 

Ranking Factors For Local Search

By: RH

Over the last year Google has brought us a whole zoo full of changes to search. We have had the Panda updates and then there was the Penguin.

There have been stories written about Google only showing 7 results instead of 10 per page

Danny Sullivan wrote: It looks as if Google is testing a move away from showing the traditional 10 listings to only displaying seven, and it also appears that it’s even easier than ever for one site to dominates all those results.

The game keeps changing and you need to keep up. Annexcore put out a piece on local search factors that is worth looking at. Its also worth reading the blog post they wrote which details some of the points made in the infographic.

http://www.annexcore.com/blog/win-local-search-with-top-ranking-factors-infographic/