SEO News Blog

I suppose that’s not a headline story, but I stumbled across some very interesting research data and I thought that it would be really nice to share it with you and confirm with statistics the fact that internet users are getting smarter and smarter and they are heavily exploiting search engine functions to better navigate their way in finding their desired information. Also as we’ve expected the growth in popularity is quite impressive and you must check it out.

Since the dot com boom (1994-1996) the internet is growing quite rapidly both in content (the number of websites) and in the same time in the number of it’s users, somehow becoming a way of life. I’m not going to exaggerate but yes we live in the Internet Era where massive amounts of information can be easily accessed and only with a single click you can find what you are looking for. This incredible network of information enables people to easily access virtually unlimited collection of shared user data on large variety of topics (in exception are only few countries like china that don’t have human rights and similar, but that’s only when politics collides with our freedom of information flow) and this improves our level of knowledge in particular interests quite drastically due to our new ability to find numerous documents without even leaving our home. In the recent past, libraries, newspapers and magazines were the only places where people can find information on events and discoveries but now things are so different and so easy for all of us. This ability to gather more and more information virtually effortless in such a short period of time enables humans to maximize their learning abilities and to obtain more and more knowledge n their particular field of interest.

North America has the largest percentage of internet users in the whole world mainly due to the fact that Internet for first time was developed in the US in early 1962 as a Government/Military Project for linking computers around the states in case of War, but quickly reshaped as very useful way to transfer information between two points. The first developers of the ARPNET project (the first name of the internet) were MIT and NPL, and they are considered to be the inventors of the internet. Actually our common understanding of the internet came far later in 1980 when students began exploiting the possibility to “host” public chat rooms and share information between each other by opening file servers. This quickly became popular and in early 1990’s the first public websites were born.

People quickly discovered the potential of the web and started sharing more and more information thus making the internet grow exponentially. Nowadays the internet demands are so high that about 69% of all North Americans use the internet at least once a month.

A Canadian media and search engine advertising company called SKOOIZ just released some fresh research data on the internet usage and behavior of French Canadians. In March 2007 they made a survey on 1272 Canadians and shared their research results with us.

What kind of search engines people are using?

Be prepared to be amazed! And the winner for French Canadian Search Engine is…. Google with 80%, followed by Yahoo 3.6% and MSN with 2.5%. That’s mainly due to the fact that there are not that many Multilanguage search engines. The US market on the other hand is a bit more diverse as it has few more search engines but still Google has about 44%, Yahoo with 28.7% and MSN with 12.5% of the total search queries which is still not bad.

How Many Keywords people use to form their Search Query?

I guess Canadians like all other people are somehow aware of the massive amount of information stored/index by search engines and know that the best way to find what they are looking for is to use more than one keyword for effectiveness. The French Canadians for example are quite intelligent searchers and only 10% of them have the time to look in the broad search results of single keyword queries. Fortunately the rest of the interviewed people were quite skillful as 50% used two keywords, 30% used three keywords and 10% four or more keywords.

This clearly shows that people are going for the long tail keywords and optimizing only for one and two words is merely not enough. Also optimizing for the low end long tail keywords is still quite easier and you can rank on top with merely no efforts at all. Few years back most people were going for few words because there was no competition, but now within those huge amounts of data it’s quite better to go for the long tail and hit your share of the 40% in the beginning and later on as you grow then target the high end keywords.

The new internet users use advanced search engine queries

The interesting thing that got my attention is the large number of people that use advanced search queries. About 50% of all French Canadian internet users use the advanced search operators for to optimize their queries from which 10% do that on regular basis. That explains the fair number of search engine queries our SEO Website CMS logged that containing logical operators in them, so its not only French Canadians that use that functionality. I guess this new trend spreads traffic even further and now even small websites have the chance to get visited if they contain that particular set of positive and negative keywords, but that’s really very rare cases.

How many result pages internet users view?

Everybody knows that the top 3 results get 60% of all the traffic and each lower ranking decreases your possible hits enormously. Thus being on the second page (lower than 10 positions) is almost like you don’t exist. French Canadians are no different. If not able to find what they are looking for, about 15% don’t even bother to go to the second page and immediately run a new query. Then about 40% of the people that bothered to view the second page simply give up and run new query. We can note that the funnel shaped traffic is mostly for the top 5 listings and the rest gets only a few clicks. In this sense, I’ve received so many responses from my clients that when they got to the top 3 their world turned around and from a keyword that they rarely got traffic is now their biggest hit. This happens in highly relevant keywords where people find what they are looking for on the top 3-5 results and don’t even bother to go beyond that. In such situations if you are you’re ranked on position N:7-8 even highly searched keywords and you might not get more than few clicks because visitors are happy with what they found on the listings above yours.

How many people click on Sponsored Search Engine Ads?

I’ve been trying to explain that thing to most of my clients, but it’s really hard for them to understand the benefits of organic search engine listings compared to pay-per whatever advertising. The Canadian research data clearly shows that only about 2%-5% of all users click often on advertisements and about 25% state that they “sometimes” click them. On the other hand 25% say that they never click on ads and about 50% very rarely clicks on ads. This statistics explain why a lot of advertisers get thousands ad impressions with few to no clicks at all for even great looking, highly relevant advertisement.

Organic Search Engine listings are the best advertising way as it get about 80-90% of all traffic (even more than that) and if you’re ranking good you will receive so much free traffic for the small fee of few hundred dollars in Website Search Engine Optimization expenses. It would be dumb to spend so much money on Pay-Per-Click when for quite less than that you can get free organic listings.

What Age Groups are general internet visitors?

The internet users are generally young people. The largest portion of the French Canadian internet users form 25% of all users and are between 25-34 years old, followed by 19% for 45-54. The rest is about 15% youngsters 18-24, 10% teenagers, 12% for 55 and older and on last place 9.7% people of age 35-44. This shows that large portion of website visitors are from 25 to 54 years old. This can be correlated to the income and education data shown below.

How much internet users earn?

The statistics show that the largest portion of internet users (about 30%) earn in the ranges between 30k-50k per year. Then about 15% earn about 50k-70k and again 15% above 70k. This most definitely means that internet users have some good money to spend online (proven by the greatly increasing online sales statistics with each year), so it won’t be a bad idea to start your own internet store (if you don’t already have one).

How often do you use the internet?

If it was me, I was going to say all the time, but in this case 87% of the interviewed French Canadians use it every day. This huge percentage in combination with some simple predictions on the past and current internet use can predict that with each passing year the number internet users is going to almost double and therefore user traffic is going to increase dramatically. We are talking about some really huge numbers that will be quite normal in few years, so start building up websites, optimize, build links and hit the wave as hard as you can.

For more information on their findings please see their report here and you can also discuss that in their official blog here. If you are interested in getting affordable search engine optimization services for you website contact me via the contact form or call 646-536-9268

Four days ago our company joined the Kontera Publisher Network with some good advertising experiments in mind. We wanted to test if article websites can be monetized easier using in-content ads like Kontera where it simply highlights some keywords and when you hover advertising appears. Unfortunately we are so unlucky that we waisted 3 days without any idea what’s happening.

When you login to your Kontera Web Statistics you see the following message:

Reporting Delay
Data for June 18th and 19th is currently unavailable due to system maintenance! We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Actually the first message was only for June 18th and then the next day it was changed to “and 19th”, and I’m so curious if today they’re going to do the same, but still no changes. I hope they don’t have some major issue with their system because I find it quite unreliable to have such downtime without any proper warnings.

The reason why we switched to Kontera was that pay-per-click programs like AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and others are not really optimized for content insertion and somehow get stuck outside the main view frame of website visitors especially for NON-Product websites where people only concentrate on the center part where the actual article body lies. In such websites we couldn’t squeeze more than 0.3% CRT and that’s really low.

In Content advertising where the actual ads are automatically placed in the content usually perform quite better for article websites and thus we are so passionate to see the results. I guess that’s why Kontera is still down because they don’t want us to get what we need (I’m joking ok?)

UPDATE: I just got this email and thought it would be nice to share it with you:

christopher brown — Director @ Kontera Technologi wrote:
We’ve seen your recent posts. We recently installed a significant upgrade to our system and reporting didn’t move as easily as we had hoped. All hands are on deck and we are working on the matter. We have provided data for the 17th and hope to have reporting resolved by tomorrow or Friday morning at the latest. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions

I’m really found by the fact that that the kontera people are reading my blog and are trying to keep their image on top and that’s something I do appreciate in all companies. I do like kontera and their way of making business and I believe we’re going to have very nice business relationship.

I’ll keep you up to date with what’s going on.

UPDATE June 21

Kontera is back online and all the stats are up and running.
Our data is also there and we are really happy to announce that YES our experiment did confirm that the CTR for articles is quite higher in Kontera than for AdSense and other PPC programs. We managed to get 3.5% CTR which is really nice compared to the less than 1% in AdSense for the same website.

This experiment really proved the value of in-content advertising and we will keep our article/news websites to be powered by Kontera.

If you wish to experiment for yourself please feel free to visit their website and sign up - www.kontera.com

Cheers and Good Luck,
Venetsian

OK here’s the fresh list for this week:

I’ve been trying to convince webmasters for so long that Google is very smart and they are tracking user activity on the search index and also on your web pages, but in most cases people laughed at me and said that’s stupid. Guess what, finally a SEO did close monitored experiment and proved that this is true!

First lets start a bit with some background information that I guess some of you already know (whoever reads my blogs and rants on SEO). I’ve posted numerous articles and threads on different forums asking people what they think about Google’s Search Results and especially on the “onClick” javascript that monitors what Users are clicking on the search results page. In most cases people laughed at me saying that if Google is tracking this activity then a lot of people will be able to alter the Search Results and push-up or pull-down websites intentionally. Finally I got the proof on this!

The second thing that really bothered quite a lot, and also being widely discussed on different forums, is the fact that suddenly few years ago Google started offering Free Urchin Analytics Accounts which previously were paid around $300-$400 per year per website! As a businessman I really got amazed how Google suddenly became so generous and offered those really pricy services for free, and I started suspecting that they are doing some serious data mining with all that information collected. Guess what, I proved to be right, Google indeed monitors analytics accounts and website performance and its even adjusting website rankings based on that data!

The third thing that I was slapping in everybody’s faces was my readings from the latest Google Patent Application where I even labeled “VERY IMPORTANT :: USER BEHAVIOUR” in my analysis. Read the whole Google Patent text here.

Now let’s say what the proof is and what was done exactly.

Randy from 1st Rankings, just released the official data on his experiments on Google and User Behaviour Data in Rankings. He conducted two very interesting experiments which clearly show what I was trying to explain to all of you so many times.

Experiment 1 – tracking user activity without Google Analytics

Randy set up two closely monitored websites and asked 100 volunteers to search in Google for some pre-defined keywords and click on the website, then stay in the website for some time and then close the browser without returning in Google. This scenario is supposed to show Google that the User is looking for quality website in those specific keywords and the choice they did (clicking on that website) was that this website is what they were looking for. The situation is that when use clicks on a website from the search results, and then stays for some period, this period can determine how relevant this website was to the specific query keywords. If the period is short and the User returns and clicks other website, this most probably means that he/she did not found what they were looking for and the keep on looking until they find it. On the other hand, if they find a website and spend a lot of time there and even exit the site (not returning back to Google) then this most probably signals that they have found what they were looking for, and in such case, Google can award this website by increasing its ranking. This is often done when the top results are irrelevant to the query and Google automatically corrects its rankings based on the user’s judgment.

He set up two websites, one in non-popular niche and asked those 100 volunteers to click and the website, stay there for few minutes and close the browser. This signals Google that the quality is high and this website is awarded with more attention. His experiment showed that in about week, this website started moving up from position 10 to number 2.

Also he tested his theory in more competitive niche, using the same strategy, but it proved to be quite useless because the changing factor was negligible.

Experiment 2 – Tracking websites using Google Analytics

This experiment was very similar technique to the previous one, but this time he has all the websites participating being monitored by Google Analytics. Also in this scenario, he asked the volunteers to act like they are reading the website and browse throughout the website for some period.

The results proved to be astonishing. In about week and a half, the website popped up from position 80 to about 33 and maybe even more if they continued the experiment (the time frame for the experiment was exactly two weeks). This clearly shows that Google is indeed using the data collected from Google Analytics and adjusts its ranking accordingly to the User Behavior. When users find what they are looking for, the bounce rate decreases, and the time spent on the website increases. This is extremely valuable information to Google, as it’s the primary website quality characteristic.

What do we learn from that

• Yes, Google is monitoring User Behavior and that can adjust your rankings. The user behavior importance for ranking is very low, but still it is considered.
• Google monitors clicks on the Search Results page, and therefore Website Ranking Checking Software can hurt your rankings or at least won’t help.
• Google does monitor your Analytics account and if you have high bounce rate (mostly for MFA and irrelevant websites) you might get punished and loose some ranking positions. If your bounce rate is higher than 75% you should remove Analytics from that website or try to troubleshoot it and lower that rate.
• More content like articles and news on your website can help you increase the time spent and this can help you rank better for both SEO and Google user behavior tracking purposes.
• Now its really debatable if you should even use Analytics, but I believe it’s a fair price to pay for monitoring your websites so if you have good content, you should not worry about that.
• The recent acquisition of FeedBurner from Google might lead to another data mining situation when Google might start looking at your readers, but I guess that will be used in future upgrades on their algorithms.

Google can and maybe already is looking at your website quality using these monitoring techniques to price your AdSense ads and that might hurt a bit Advertising Publishers and MFA’s. We already felt last week’s changes in PPC prices based on web quality both from the Yahoo Publisher Network and Google AdSense. I’ll write on that a bit later when I gather more info.

Feel free to leave your comments on this post.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with monitoring my traffic and I found some very interesting things that I didn’t know and I thought it would be a great idea to post my findings here. In order to be able to explain correctly, please take a look on the graphic below:

As you can see on the graphics, I’ve plotted the daily reach of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live for the past five years. You can also see that I’ve specified for both yahoo, msn and live only for the search engine part because if we monitor the overall performance of Yahoo and MSN as they are not only search engines but also Web Portals, they will show quite higher stats.

From the last five years reach statistics you can clearly see the ups and downs on both Google, Yahoo and MSN. A quite significant (at least for me) event is the fact that Google from 2001 to 2006 was increasing in popularity, then stabilized for about an year, and now in 2007 its popularity is decreasing. On the other hand, Microsoft Corporation went a bit down in 2006 (due to the Google up-rise) and then in 2007 got back up quite a lot. The interesting thing here is that Microsoft Corp has both MSN and Live Search Engines and therefore their combined traffic (aka both search engines work under the same scoring/ranking algorithms and they should be considered to be the same thing) is quite more than Google and Yahoo and that’s really big thing here. If we assume that the Alexa Reach Stats are correct, then we can clearly see that Microsoft’s Search is 1.5 times bigger in volume/reach than Googles and that’s really sad news for Google.

The large spike in Search Volume for MSN/LIVE is mainly due to the heavy advertising Live.com had recently on virtually all medias. We see it on the radio, television and gigantic billboards all over the city. Also a big impact is the fact that Microsoft has built in Live Search in all Windows computers as a standard feature and we all know that about 99% of all internet users are using Windows and about 50% of those don’t really care which search engine they are using and therefore Microsoft is a good solution for their needs.

On the other hand I’ve been experiencing some very strange phenomena on my websites as I receive about 95% of my Search Engine Traffic from Google. This kind’a contradicts to the large search volume that Alexa Shows on MSN/LIVE and Yahoo and that’s a bit weird. Also the strange thing is that most of my websites rank pretty well on Google and Yahoo and therefore if the search volume is the same I should be expecting the same traffic from Yahoo as I get from Google right?

I’m really curious if someone else (like you) had noticed such funny events, because if so then we should drastically change our SEO strategies and stop kissing Google’s ass and start optimizing for MSN as we can clearly see the obvious Search Up-rise that they have. Our duty as SEO’s is to go for the search and if Google goes down then .. well who cares …

Please post your comments on this because I’m really curious to read your opinions.

UPDATE:
I was just informed that Alexa is not providing stats for Subdomains only for the primary domain and therefore we have some irrelevant information in those statistics plotted above. The issue is that Yahoo is a portal and therefore is receiving tons of traffic for the Email, News and other services offered there and the Search Portion is not really predictable. The same situation is with MSN.com as its also a big portal, and Live.com hosts the MSN Spaces for Blogger accounts. Also we can note that Google is offering tons of other services and that the data provided is not only for the Search Traffic.

When we further analyze the situation we can see that Live.COM is growing big and when we combine the traffic from the estimated number of searches from MSN and LIVE we ca assume (same as above) that the Microsoft Search is still very large portion of the total search engine traffic on the Internet and might have very close amount of search traffic as Google.

Nevertheless there is no clear proof that those statistics are correct and therefore are my own assumption based on my analysis on the Alexa statistics and might be not correct or even misleading. If I have better supported statistics that can be proved, we can determine the situation with better precision, but until then that’s what we’ve got.