1. Better Living through Better Searching
SuccessWorks Search Marketing Tactics™ Training
Better Living through Better Searching
May 9, 2009
Presented by Leslie Carruthers President of The Search Guru
Copyright 2004 SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, Inc.
Phone: +1 (360)

2. The most popular common search engines

3. Search engine statistics for April 2009
Google 72.92%
Yahoo! 16.14%
Ask 3.95%
MSN 3.51%

4. A sampling of Web 2.0 search engines

5. Web 2.0 search engine statistics
In August 2008 YouTube received more traffic than Yahoo. (ComScore)
In December 2008, 3 of the top 10 websites were social (Web 2.0) websites.
Google and Yahoo now incorporate “other” media, such as video, news and products for sale, into the normal search results.

6. Google’s Universal Search
Google’s universal search engine now integrates results from its regular “horizontal” search engine along with its many “vertical,” or specialized, search engines about specific topics.
Google attempts to place the most relevant results first, since most searchers will generally choose to click on one of the first few results.

7. Google’s vertical search engines
Or you may want to go directly to one of the vertical engines for a specific search

8. Search engine results are powered by math, not by common sense
SuccessWorks Search Marketing Tactics™ Training
Search engine results are powered by math, not by common sense
Copyright 2004 SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, Inc.
Phone: +1 (360)

9. What is an algorithm?

10. How the algorithms have evolved
Technologies that are layered in the search engine algorithms
Exact word-for- word matching
Stemming of words for faster matching
Term vectors, clustering and
themes
Links and anchor text
Communities of sites based on keyphrases and links
Next?

11. What are the major factors in the search engine algorithm?
Content and text

12. What are the major factors in the search engine algorithm?
Links

13. Why this may not return the best results
SuccessWorks Search Marketing Tactics™ Training
Why this may not return the best results
Cheating
Leslie: this site has a bunch of text below the fold for the search engines.
Copyright 2004 SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, Inc.
Phone: +1 (360)

14. Why this may not return the best results
Misunderstanding

15. Why this may not return the best results
Vagueness

16. What determines the order of search results?
Your search terms are contained in the URL

17. What determines the order of search results?
Your search terms are contained in the title of the page

18. What determines the order of search results?
Your search terms are contained in the text on the page

19. What determines the order of search results?
Sites that are linking to the page
Quality of the links

20. What determines the order of search results?
Sites that are linking to the page
How many links

21. What determines the order of search results?
Sites that are linking to the page
Relationship of the links

22. What determines the order of search results?
We covered the big ones, but over 400 factors are looked at to match any given search to any given web page

23. How people search: window shopping vs. buying
General search
Problem identified
Gathering information
Specific search
Ready to purchase

24. Improve your search results
Be precise – type exactly what you mean. Better results come from 3-4 words rather than 1-2 words.

25. Improve your search results
Include your location when necessary

26. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Quotes (“search terms”) To search for exact phrase

27. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Site:domain.com To search pages within a site

28. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Exclude (-) To omit a search term

29. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Wildcard (*)

30. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
OR (word OR word)

31. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Definitions (define:)

32. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Specific types of files (filetype:)

33. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Range of numbers (#…#)

34. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Related:domain.com To search sites that are related to domain.com

35. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Info:domain.com To get information about domain.com

36. Improve your search results
Use advanced operators
Calculator functions
+ (addition)
- (subtraction)
* (multiplication)
/ (division)
% of (percentage)
^ (power of)

37. Examples of using advanced operators effectively
Searching university sites

38. Examples of using advanced operators effectively
SuccessWorks Search Marketing Tactics™ Training
Examples of using advanced operators effectively
Looking only for PDFs
Note: This can be used to find MP3s too. Interesting to mention in the talk but not something I would put on the PPT.
Copyright 2004 SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, Inc.
Phone: +1 (360)

39. Examples of using advanced operators effectively
SuccessWorks Search Marketing Tactics™ Training
Examples of using advanced operators effectively
Sites with bad or no search functions
Copyright 2004 SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, Inc.
Phone: +1 (360)

40. SuccessWorks Search Marketing Tactics™ Training
Free resources
Google advanced operators cheat sheet:
The Search Guru “Search Questions” blog:
Current search engine statistics: search-stats.asp
Copyright 2004 SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, Inc.
Phone: +1 (360)

41. Thank You from The Search Guru!
SuccessWorks Search Marketing Tactics™ Training
Thank You from The Search Guru!
896 Arboretum Circle Sagamore Hills, OH
Copyright 2004 SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, Inc.
Phone: +1 (360)