SEO Crunch

Inside The Mind of A Searcher

There are a lot of different ways to attract traffic to your new web site, but probably none are as important as Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. Good SEO tactics can mean a huge influx of visitors to your web site, eager (or at least interested) for the information that you provide or the product that you sell.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a straightforward concept; if you have any experience on the Internet at all, the odds are pretty high that you have experienced it to some degree. Any time you go to Google, Yahoo!, or one of the other big search engines for a search, you are likely going to click on a landing page for a site that has an SEO minded individual or team.

With their knowledge, they have created a page which ranks well on the search engines, one of the first pages a searcher will look at.

Why will a searcher look at that page?

Knowing how to attract a person searching on the Internet to your web site goes hand in hand with understanding why that person may be looking for a site like yours in the first place.

A big mistake that was made for quite a while by many web site developers was to use search engine optimization practices that worked great for the spiders the engines used, but really didn’t have that much appeal for a human searcher. Their sites ranked well, but once searchers got there, they were likely just to hit the back button and look for something else.

Really, if you just think about the times you have gone onto a search engine looking for information on something, you can understand the mindset of most people using the Internet. We’ve compiled a list below of some of the questions we think are the most important in the mindset of someone searching the web.

Where is this page ranked?

It’s been stated over and over again, and you can probably back it up with personal experience; if a page isn’t listed on the first three pages of a search, people are unlikely to go there. If you are going to make SEO a part of your web site’s success, then, you will need to make sure that your page(s) are listed within the first few results, preferably in the top five on the first three results pages.

Is this information useful?

We briefly touched on this above, but it is so important as to bear going into detail over. Whenever you are using SEO tactics, remember that in the end you are writing for the searcher, not for the Google crawlers. This mistake has been made over and over by web site developers, mainly because it used to work.

However, the search engines are not interested in sending their users to a page that is stuffed with keywords and not much else; they want to provide a useful service to relevant information and are changing their algorithms accordingly. In fact, the last year has been almost revolutionary in the way that the search engines are rating their content; gone are the days when the first 30 results would be a bunch of random, useless keywords.

The upshot of all this is that in order to be successful in a search engine marketing campaign, you have to think like a searcher, not like a search engine.

Remember, you don’t just want to attract traffic; you want the people who arrive at your site through a search engine to find what they were looking for and come back, hopefully letting everyone else they know in on your site. Pages that are ranked highly and which contain useful information will be successful in the search engine world.