How People Search

How People Search the Web

Did you know that 53% of websites are found by word-of-mouth? Yes, the old gossip method still works. There are many ways of spreading the news among friends, relatives, clients, your industry, and the general public through links on your blog or site or just by telling people about some cool site you’ve just found. While this is the most successful method, the rest of the world finds you through search engines. Let’s look at how your site or blog can be found through search engines and what you can do to improve your changes of being found. After all, your goal is to be found, right?

How Do You Search?

Think about how you search the web. Do you start out vague, guessing at possible keyword combinations? Or do you think it through to come up with the specific phrase or term to narrow your search immediately? Do you often search within those results (refining your search) or start over? How many pages of the results do you go through before you start over or just give up? Do you start with Google or Yahoo, or another search engine? Which search engines are people using the most?

Answering these questions tells you a lot about how people search and about how people would search for you.

Keywords play an important role in your search engine ranking, representing the words that users will use to search for your site. Think about the words you would use to search for your blog. What are the descriptive phrases? Do you have those words in your blog content?

If you talk about or sell toothbrushes, but never mention “teeth”, aren’t you missing something? As professional nature photographers, we redid our main website recently and realized that most of our web page articles and images were related to travel and not so much to nature, so we rearranged our material to be more specific to travel, with nature as a side line. Examine your own site to match what people search for with what content and keywords are featured on your site.