Searching for Results with Search Engines
Online marketing has become popular because it can be cost effective and produces almost instantaneous results. Now, people can perform searches on the Internet using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others and see their results in a matter of seconds. They can look for products and service offerings 24/7 and qualify themselves as valuable prospects all by using a search engine.
Search engines can help people searching find:
- product or service offering
- brochures, whitepapers, and videos from organizations
- customer service information
- locations where a particular product is offered
- more about an organization reputation, reliability, and fitness for their purpose
The majority of traffic to websites originates from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN. If a website or a web page cannot be found by the search engines, it has no chance to have its content indexed (put into a search engine database). This can be devastating to the online marketer because information about websites, web pages, or other information that is not in a search engine’s database, will not be displayed in the results of a query and potential prospects will not be directed to that listing.
Opening the Door – Keyword Phrases
When keyword phrases are entered into a query, a search engine searches its database of information to see what information matches that keyword phrase. As it searches its database for these keyword phrases, it filters the results according to its own algorithm and other factors so it only displays what its algorithm has calculated to be relevant. Relevancy is a key item to getting results. A search engine results page (SERP) displays the most relevant matches in the top positions and the least relevant ones in the bottom positions. The display shows every entry that the search engine has in its database at that particular point of time.
Choosing the most relevant keyword phrases to your product/service offerings is a key factor to the success of searchers find out about your company, product, services, etc.
