Traffficum.com – Traffic for your website

Posts Tagged ‘search engine’

Microsoft has released a new MSN Toolbar which is powered by Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, reported the Bing team on Twitter. Check out the new Toolbar at toolbar.msn.com.

Here is a screen capture:

Yahoo's search and infrastructure expert Doug Cutting is leaving the company to join Cloudera. He will be leaving Yahoo! at the end of August, 2009. Cutting created the Hadoop technology for Yahoo's search index.

Although, people are assuming that the recent Yahoo-Microsoft deal, in which Microsoft would take over Yahoo's search engine can be the reason behind Cutting's move, he told the New York Times that is not the case.

“This has been in the works for awhile and is unrelated,” Doug Cutting said. “I am definitely not leaving in any sort of protest, and the thing I like least about this move is that it might be perceived that way.”

Well, Cutting will be doing the same sort of work at Cloudera that he has been doing at Yahoo. In his personal blog, Cutting informed that he will continue working with Yahoo! developers.

James Carswell has reported that Google has shifted the search ads on the right hand side of the search results page, or more precisely, closer to the free results. The same has been noticed by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land and below is a video where Barry illustrates the change:

In the video, you can see the Firefox browser that features the ads closer to the organic (free results) listings. It also shows that when the browser's width is expanded, the ads do not move to the far right. You could remember the ads moving to the far right in Safari, that is the old way!

After a July update less than two weeks ago, Bing seems to be updating again. Many webmasters are noticing a search results update on Microsoft'search engine. Some webmasters are reporting their experiences in a WebmasterWorld thread as follows:

“Definitely seeing a shift across the board. Biggest change I can pinpoint is a continued decrease in relevancy of KIDs (keywords in domain). More than 80% of the top 500 KWs I track showed movement (mostly positive for me and mostly displacing a lot of KIDs results).”

“Yes, looks like an update – and Bing traffic converts well with certain demographics. Now I've gotta scramble to do some long over-due site updates because some pages popped up out of nowhere.”

Now, you know why it's happening if you are seeing an increase or decline in your referrers from Bing recently!

Forum discussion going on at WebmasterWorld.

Sure, your website has traffic, but is it the right traffic? Are the people frequenting your website finding the information they want? Many times, website owners are so concerned with the number of visitors, they lose track of what those visitors are doing, or even if they are the right type of visitors. So ask yourself, “Do I have the right traffic coming to my website?”

To address this question, look at your major keywords. Take a minute and determine whether the information on your website is relevant to your keywords if searched for on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. There are a number of times where I have seen the content of the website irrelevant to the keyword the site owner is targeting.

Second, take a look at your analytics and see what traffic the search engines are sending your way, and what keywords people are using to find your site. In Google Analytics, click on the “Traffic Sources” tab, and then click the “Search Engines” option in the submenu. From here it will give you a list of the different search engines that have sent traffic (both paid and unpaid) to your website. Click on a particular Search Engine, such as Google, and you will see a list of terms that were searched when they found your site.

Your results will look similar to this.

This report shows search patterns and keyword terms. It also provides a better understanding of how people are finding your site, and what keywords are being used. This list shows what Google finds to be relevant to your website as well, allowing insight to how Google views your site.

When reviewing the report, take a close look at the bounce rate of keywords used. This indicates whether visitors are finding their desired information on your website. Consider the example above, the keyword “hsplit download” (third from the top), has an extremely high bounce rate of 96.36%, indicating that the 110 visitors more than likely did not find the information they expected from the website. Compare that to the first term on the list “802.11bg wlan driver,” which has a bounce rate of 31.86%. From this report it is easy to determine that the content/page referring to “hsplit download” needs to be refined, and reworked.

Studying analytics will deliver an understanding of past trends, and help you make decisions on how to revise  content  to provide better results. But if you are starting new, or want a better idea of how to prepare for future traffic, there are other ways to plan for the right traffic. Last month David Scoville wrote an excellent article on getting toknow your target market, and learning from a basic focus group. He offers a simple way to find out how to understand the way your “right traffic” thinks.

When I first dove into SEO and SEM, I was taught a valuable principle when planning for keywords and targeted traffic: People who are doing research on a topic use broad keywords to gather information. Once that information is gathered, people search vary specific and generally use “longer tail” phrases to find and purchase a product.

An example of this principle would be when someone is interested in getting a website hosted; they may look up a general keyword such as “website hosting.” However, when the person makes the shift from researching the product to buying the product, they are more likely to be more specific in their search and my look for “VPS PHP web server.”

What does this mean to you? Well the conversions from a visitor to a buyer are more likely to happen with longer tail keyword searches, meaning you will have more of the “right traffic” coming to your website. Now it is apparent that there is less traffic overall associated with the more specific and sometimes longer tail keywords, but the traffic that is coming to your site is more qualified and has a better potential of converting, and that is far more important than just trying to build high traffic numbers.

Take time to evaluate your current traffic, and see what trends in your analytics can help you improve your visitor’s time on the website. The goal of proper SEO is to not pretend to be the most relevant to the search, but to actually BE THE MOST RELEVANT. Sure you have traffic to the website, and when all is said and done all traffic is good traffic, but only the right traffic will keep the website up and the bills paid.