How Search Engines Are Impacting You, Your Business and Sales

How long do you think search engines have been around?

Did you know that 97% of people will search the internet via Search Engines to find products and services?

Mobile usage will overtake desktops and laptops by 2015.

Where do you and your business show up in search? Are you on page 1, page 10? If not how do I get to page 1 without breaking the bank? What are the keys to improving my search results?

Google is the #1 search engine. Bing #2, and Yahoo #3.

History of Search Engines

In the summer of 1993, no search engine existed for the web, though numerous specialized catalogs were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format. This formed the basis for W3Catalog,

The web’s first primitive search engine, was released on September 2, 1993.

Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. Yahoo! was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than its full-text copies of web pages. Information seekers could also browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search.

Yahoo broke out of the pack early on and became the #1 Search Engine of Choice commanding around 70% of the market.

Google adopted the idea of selling search terms in 1998, from a small search engine company named goto.com. This move had a significant effect on the SE business, which went from struggling to one of the most profitable businesses in the internet.

Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began to display listings from Looksmart, blended with results from Inktomi. For a short time in 1999, MSN Search used results from AltaVista were instead. In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot).

Microsoft’s rebranded search engine, Bing, was launched on June 1, 2009. On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized a deal in which Yahoo! Search would be powered by Microsoft Bing technology.

How Web Search Engines Work

A search engine operates in the following order:

Take #1 and #2. All the search engines use a software to crawl your website and content. In the past it used to be months before it would crawl and index. Today it is a few times a month. TIP: If you are on Google+ it is DAILY!!!

For #2, I see this constantly in my consulting work. Most website’s are not optimized for search. So, when the search engines crawl your site, it is negatively affecting your search results. Until your website is optimized, you will be constantly penalized in search.

#3 Searching – The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the “best” results first.

TIP: You must choose the right keywords and keyword phrases
TIP: Choose high ranking sites to get backlinks from
TIP: Become a content producer. You are in control of you, and your BRAND!

Who’s King of Search Now

Google is #1.

In 2006 there were 6 million searches conducted a day in Google, today it is 3 Billion!

Google’s rise to success was in large part due to a patented algorithm called PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given search string. When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site’s importance. Previous keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page.

Fast forward to today, and the latest update from Google is termed “Hummingbird.” Now more than ever Google is incorporating your Social Media Footprint into it’s search rankings. Authorship – is getting higher rankings. Google is determining your relevancy by what you post, where you post, how much engagement does it draw and will give you higher rankings.