Search engines and directories are the main way Internet users discover web sites. Various resources confirm this statement, and the percentages generally range from 42 percent of Internet users to 86 percent.
a research organization specializing in consumer purchasing and behavior, tested the impact of search engine listings and banner advertisements across a variety of web sites to determine which marketing medium was more effective. In each situation, search engine listings came out on top. They found consumers are five times more likely to purchase your products or services after finding a web site through a search engine rather than through a banner advertisement.
According to my stats more that 40% of consumers go to a search engine like Google , yahoo, AltaVista, Dogpile, Ask, etc and type the product name as a search query when they are looking for a product to purchase online.
Search engines and directories average over 300 million searches per day. Therefore, regardless of whether the percentage value is as low as 28 percent or as high as 86 percent, millions of searches are performed every day. Properly preparing your web site for search engine visibility increases the probability that web searchers will visit your site.
Additionally, think about your own personal experience. Where do you go to search for information about a company or a product on the web? Where do you go to find a site whose web address you do not know or cannot remember? In these cases, you probably use a search engine or directory to find the information.
Web searchers are not random visitors. When searchers enter a series of words into a search engine query, they are actively searching out a specific product or service. Thus, the traffic your site receives from the search engines is already targeted. In other words, web searchers are self-qualified prospects for your business.
Of course, search engines are not the only way in which people discover web sites. People may find a web address in offline sources such as print, television, or radio. They might click a link to a web site in an email document or a banner advertisement. Word of mouth (referral marketing) also is a popular method of bringing visitors to sites. In addition, people locate sites by clicking links from one site to another, commonly known as surfing the web.
Because millions of people use the search engines and directories to discover web sites, maximizing your site's search engine visibility can be a powerful and cost-effective part of an online marketing plan. A properly performed search engine marketing campaign can provide a tremendous, long-term return on investment (ROI).
Search ServiecesSearch services can generally be categorized into two types of sources: directories and search engines. Many people confuse the two terms, often referring to Yahoo! as a search engine. See The search services use two main sources to obtain their listings.
The first type of search service is called a directory, and a directory uses human editors to manually place web sites or web pages into specific categories. A directory is commonly called a "human-based" search engine.
The other type of search service is called a search engine, and a search engine uses special software robots, called spiders or crawlers, to retrieve information from web pages. This type of search service is called a "spider-based" or "crawler-based" search engine.
How many of you know
Yahoo is a directory and Google is a Search Engine
Any guess About MSN
It is a semi Search Engine
MSN Search is classified as a directory. Its primary results come from the LookSmart database, and its secondary (fall-through) results currently come from Inktomi, a search engine.
Let See What is Search Engine
What differentiates a search engine from a directory is that the directory databases consist of sites that have been added by human editors. Search engine databases are compiled through the use of special software robots, called spiders, to retrieve information from web pages.
Search engines perform three basic tasks:
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Search engine spiders find and fetch web pages, a process called crawling or spidering, and build lists of words and phrases found on each web page.
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Search engines keep an index (or database) of the words and phrases they find on each web page they are able to crawl. The part of the search engine that places the web pages into the database is called an indexer.
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Search engines then enable end users to search for keywords and keyword phrases found in their indices. Search engines try to match the words typed in a search query with the web page that is most likely to have the information for which end users are searching. This part of the search engine is called the query processor.
How do search engines begin finding web pages? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers from major Internet service providers (ISPs), such as America Online, and the most frequently visited web sites, such as Yahoo!, the Open Directory, LookSmart, and other major directories. Search engine spiders will begin crawling these popular sites, indexing the words on every single page of a site and following every link found within a site. This is one of the major reasons it is important for a web site to be listed in the major directories.
Cheers
Karthick
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