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November 15, 2006 By 3 Comments

Search Engine Basics – Part One, What Search Engines Are Important?

I get a lot of questions about search engine optimization (SEO), and with good reason. A recent competitive analysis found that over 50% of prospective students conducted an internet search during the course of their evaluation of different MBA programs. Not only that, but this method of research was the largest percentage of any other communications channel. Let me repeat this by yelling on the internet: THE LARGEST PERCENTAGE OF ANY OTHER COMMUNICATIONS CHANNEL.


Sorry about that.

Because of this, I plan to make my next collection of posts on the topic of search engine basics. We’ll start at the beginning, a very good place to start: What search engines are important?

Taking a peek at the statistics for October 2006, the search engines that drive traffic to www.bus.wisc.edu break down as follows:

Google: ~88%
Yahoo!: ~9%
MSN: ~2%
AOL: ~.4%
Ask Jeeves: ~0.3%

For this reason, we’ll focus mainly on Google for optimization. It should be noted, however, that these results are skewed since we use Google’s public service search for our internal site search.

Here’s your homework: go to google.com/toolbar and install the Google toolbar (if you haven’t already). Visit some pages and make note of the green bar titled “PageRank.”

PageRank

Hover over the bar with your mouse, it should pop a little yellow box that reads something like: “PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page (X/10).

This is a logarithmic scale that Google uses to assign importance to pages. (Sidenote: the Richter scale that’s used to measure earthquakes is also logarithmic, so the difference between a 2 and a 3 is much less than the difference between an 8 and a 9…it’s a math thing). Check the page rank of big sites like cnn.com, yahoo.com, etc. How do they compare to the page rank of your site?

Wouldn’t it be nice to get a hunk of that PageRank? We’ll talk about that another time.

Filed Under: Content, Strategy
  • Chris Benish

    But webmaster, your stats seem to indicate that 99.7% of our traffic comes from a search engine. Aren’t there some visitors that just come here because they know about us already? Or, what about someone like me that has a page in the http://www.bus.wisc.edu domain set as their homepage, so I visit like a bajillion (also a math thing) times per day? Is this an example of the skewed statistics that [insert partisan talk show host] keeps warning me about?

  • Mark Anderson

    Good question, Chris. Those statistics are for people who are referred from search engines only. We had about 350,000 page views in October. Of those page views, we received about 16,000 referrals from search engines.

    Your point about internal traffic is a valid one. There are many computers within Grainger Hall that have their browsers default to a specific page on the School of Business site. Any time someone fires up a browser, it counts as a page view. Perhaps this is a policy we should look at.

    On one hand, we don’t want extra pageviews. On the other, we don’t want to discount valid internal traffic.

  • Seann Sweeney

    Mr. Webmaster,

    Can you explain “description” meta tag and “keywords” metatag. I think the keywords meta tag is the description that shows up under a search result on a search engine. Where does the “description” meta tag show up? Also, can you somehow view these meta tags when you are on a webpage itself or just when doing a search from a search engine?

    Sincerely,

    Mr. Sweeney