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Search Engine Statistics - Position Clicks

Via Threadwatch, Jacob Nielsen analyzes a recent SERP study and provides his own insights.

First, the study:

Professor Thorsten Joachims and colleagues at Cornell University conducted a study of search engines. Among other things, their study examined the links users followed on the SERP (search engine results page). They found that 42% of users clicked the top search hit, and 8% of users clicked the second hit. So far, no news. Many previous studies, including my own, have shown that the top few entries in search listings get the preponderance of clicks and that the number one hit gets vastly more clicks than anything else.

What is interesting is the researchers’ second test, wherein they secretly fed the search results through a script before displaying them to users. This script swapped the order of the top two search hits. In other words, what was originally the number two entry in the search engine’s prioritization ended up on top, and the top entry was relegated to second place.

In this swapped condition, users still clicked on the top entry 34% of the time and on the second hit 12% of the time.

Here are the two explanations as to why:

• Search engines are so good at judging relevancy that they almost always place the best hit on top.
• Users click the top hit not because it’s any better, but simply because it’s first. This might be due to sheer laziness (after all, you start from the top) or because users assume the search engine places the best hit on top, whether that’s actually true or not.

Jacob concludes:

Given how often the search engine was wrong, users clicked the top hit far too frequently. And when the two top hits were swapped, too few users changed their behavior. In other words, we can conclude that there is a strong bias in favor of clicking the top link, though not so strong that link quality is irrelevant.

The actionable consequences for search engine marketing are not particularly surprising: It’s extremely important to be listed first, to the extent that you can achieve this. But it’s also important to have good microcontent to increase the likelihood that users will perceive your site as relevant to their needs. Good page titles and article summaries are a must.

I agree. Two conclusions I feel can be drawn from this is that (1) users trust the search engines, but (2) also throw in a bit of discretion, which would explain why swapping the results didn’t swap the percentages or see them remain the same. It is important to note that position is clearly favored here, so a higher rank seems to be nine times out of 10 better than a more relevant result. As for what users do when they reach your site, that’s obviously another matter.

CSS Hacks, Tips and Tricks

Pete Freitag has a nice list of 20 CSS tips and tricks. I’m familiar with most of them, but a few were new to me.

Keyword Research Guide & SEO Optimization Tips

Wordtracker has just unveiled their comprehensive keyword research guide, which provides lots of nice tricks when researching keywords for your next SEO project. Newbie SEOs will find a lot of useful information in the second appendix:

On-Page SEO (Required)

• The title tag
• The description tag
• Headings and subheadings
• Body copy
• Links on the page
• Alt text

On-Page SEO (Additional)

• Bulleted lists within the body copy
• Quotations and interviews
• References at the bottom of the article
• Add a takeaway box
• Link title
• Testimonials from satisfied customers
• Signature box at the end of the article

Link Building

• Listing on subsidiary and partner sites
• Directory listings
• Press releases
• In by-lines to articles that you publish
• Reciprocal links
• Paid-for links

Now I don’t agree with the whole list, but it’s a nice place from which to start.

Press Releases and SEO

John Alexander has a great tip in a recent Search Engine Guide article about press releases and SEO:

Remember that with Press Releases the most important thing is that you are always focused on telling “a story” that is either “hard news” or “newsworthy.” Wordtracker can be quite helpful though. This is another high performance strategy that we teach to our Search Engine Workshop students.

You can literally make a donation with some news services to move your position up in the news feeds and so at initial stages you want to ensure you are at least within the top 10 stories going out for that day. Be sure to use your researched keyword phrase as a “complete phrase” within your Title, Body Text and in the summary. Depending on which service you use to release your story, you can have options that could get you exposure in literally hundreds or even thousands of news related publications including many of the search engine news areas too. Eventually your press release could show up in the regular search results even after the initial release so this is where optimization also helps a lot.

The rest of the article has lots of neat Wordtracker information, as well.

When You Can’t Buy Text Links

Rand over at SEOmoz has a nice post detailing ways to build links without reaching for the wallet:

• Know Before You Ask
• Build Targeted, Linkable Content
• Send a Letter
• Get on the Phone
• Offer Product(s)
• Build a Threeway
• Reciprocate with a 3rd Party
• The Truth & Nothing but The Truth

Read the post for an explanation of each.

Free Opera!

I missed this a few days ago, but Opera has been freed. I haven’t checked out the browser in a while, but wow! It’s hands-down the best looking browser out there, there’s native searching in the location bar(!), tab relocation, and a few other goodies. Check it out - there’s no more ads to be bothered with.

SEO Term Targeting

An interesting white paper from Dr. E. Garcia on the topic of term targeting is an interesting read for the more scientifically inclined SEOs out there.

Outgoing Links and SEO

There’s a nice discussion over at SEOmoz - based on a discussion over at sitepoint - about the value of outgoing links. Well, it’s not really a discussion as the consensus is that they do help, but both views are presented.

They do:

“I believe that search engines use outbound links like any other type of on-page content to help determine things like “trust”, “quality” and “authority”. It may not provide a large boost, but by linking to high quality sites that are relevant to your page topics, you’re showing search engines (and visitors) that you take the quality of your own pages seriously and are linking with care and intent (rather than for advertising or link exchange purposes).”

They don’t:

Thats like saying by using meta tags you’re showing that your pages are of high quality. Outgoing links are meaningless in this regard. Anyone can add them, regardless of the quality of their site, and they do not automatically add to the quality of their site.

There’s also a few comments worth noting:

• If linking to bad sites constitutes bad neighborhood, won’t linking to good ones constitutes good neighborhood?
• There is absolutely no question outbound links help. If you engage in any buying and selling of text link advertising you’ll see the value pretty quickly.

The conclusion: link out. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll be better off doing what your users will appreciate. The engines are always catching up to these practices, and following them will nine times out of 10 put you in the right place for your long-term marketing strategy.

Google Reinclusion Request

Matt Cutts’ most recent contribution to the SEO community discusses why and how you might want to file a Google reinclusion request:

First off, what’s a reinclusion request and why would you want to do one? If you’ve been experimenting with SEO, or you employ as SEO company that might be doing things outside Google’s guidelines, and your site has taken a precipitous drop recently, you may have a spam penalty. A reinclusion request asks Google to remove any potential spam penalty.

He then outlines what Google wants to know in the reinclusion request:

Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future. If you employed an SEO company, it indicates good faith if you tell us specifics about the SEO firm and what they did–it assists us in evaluating reinclusion requests. Note that SEO and mostly-affiliate sites may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reincluded; such sites should be quite familiar with Google’s quality guidelines.

Where do you send your request? Well, that happens at Google’s help center.

Dissecting Nielsen and Hitwise Data

Search Engine Lowdown has a nice post from a couple days ago about why the two most authoritative statistics about search engine dominance differ so much.