Using Search Engines to Your Advantage – Part 1

After speaking to dozens of my clients over the years, I have realized that there is a prevailing fog of confusion and misinformation surrounding search engines and how they operate. In this series, I will explain in basic terms what a search engine is, how it makes money and how to use it to your advantage. All of the information we provide will build in complexity as we delve further into topics so I recommend reading them in order even if the first couple of entries seem rudimentary.

1. What is a search engine?

A search engine is simply a website that searches every other website online to find the one that best matches the search term or keyword entered by the user. Each search engine is operated by a different company and has defined different criteria to determine which sites best match the keyword(s) entered by the user.

For example – I did a search on Google and Yahoo! for “Los Angeles dog groomers” and both yielded completely different results. Below are screenshots of both:

Google:

Yahoo!:

2. Why do search engines display different results for the same search?

As demonstrated in the example above, both Google and Yahoo! display entirely different results for the same search. According to Google, it searched 257,000 sites and Yahoo! searched 206,000. Both have a different formula or algorithm they use to decide which site is first and which is last and while neither company will reveal the exact process used to arrive at the list displayed, both give site owners suggestions to improve their chances of ranking well. And while there is some mystery caused by not knowing exactly how your site is being evaluated by any search engine, there is one basic concept all search engines adhere to:

The relevancy, uniqueness and quality of the information provided will always be a deciding factor in placing one site before another. To understand why this concept is true for all search engines and will remain as such you have to understand how they make their money.

3. How does a search engine make money?

All search engines operate on a business model much like a newspaper. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use the New York Times as an example. The NY Times’ primary revenue comes from advertisers who buy ads in the newspaper to advertise to the paper’s readers. The price of the ad is determined by the size, placement and most importantly by the projected number of people that will view it. The same formula is used to determine the cost of a Super Bowl commercial.  This year 97.5 million people watched Super Bowl XLII and advertisers paid 2.6 million for the right to advertise to them for 30 seconds.

The NY Times and Google are much the same. The larger their viewership, the more their ad space is worth. Their best method for attracting a large amount of returning viewers is to consistently provide a quality product to the people that rely on them for information. If the NY Times is not providing in-depth, accurate, timely news and it is not better and more relevant than the news the LA Times is providing, their viewers have no reason to read their paper (and view their ads). Google is exactly the same.

Google has become the dominant search engine because it provides the best results based on what people are searching for as determined by the people doing the searching. As a business, you can take advantage of the audience Google has acquired by appearing prominently in their search results and channeling their traffic to your site. And you can do it for free.

Next Up:

In part 2 we will discuss how to effectively use a search engine to gain exposure for your site, the cost of using a search engine and the time in which you can expect results.

All comments are welcome!

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