Don’t Blame the SEO - Five Things That Affect Search Engine Listings

Posted Mon, 10/12/2009 - 05:45 by admin

Don’t Blame the SEO - Five Things That Affect Search Engine Listings
1. Keywords – Everyone fights for the top ranks, but not all make it to the top. Make sure you spell your keywords the exact way your users would do. If it’s too much competitive chances are you wouldn’t have the desired listings right at the first go. That doesn’t mean you can’t have top rankings for other keywords. It’s always better to work on not-so-competitive keywords first and get good listings for them, while you can continue working on the competitive ones. This way you wouldn’t loose valuable visitors using lesser used keywords.
2. User Location – Search results are affected by user location. If your business is based in California and show up at #4, you may be lower or higher in any other given city at any given time. The crux of the matter is do not always expect the same ranking for different places.
3. Personalized Search – The personalized Search feature of Google allows users to view search results they have an inclination for. Don’t loose sleep if some users are not landing on your site through personalized searches, rest assured some others are. You cannot have any control over personal search listings. It’s solely dependant on the user’s browsing history.
4. Blended Search – Google incorporates images, video, news etc. in its normal search results and this is called Blended Search. Your rank would in this case depend on multimedia, image and news content on your site. Blended search results are often not the same even for a particular set of keywords.

5. Long Tailed Keywords – Keywords are short tailed and long tailed. The short tailed ones are usually more competitive than the long tailed ones for regular searches. Most sites fight for search listings for short tailed keywords without knowing the risks and benefits. As it is short tailed keywords are competitive, so you’ll have to work more on the site’s SEO, but these keywords have a huge disadvantage. Users have different buying phases – interested, decisive and buy it now. The first type would conduct a casual search to know about a product, the second one would already be having some information about the product but would like to know more and the third one knows what to buy and would buy it the moment it’s available. It’s better to have long tailed keywords with all specs included – every visit would turn into a sale. This applies well to e-commerce sites.