Case Study: Search Engine Placement

by Akarin Weatherford

If you want to know about search engine placement and want to see who may be doing it right, then follow along with this test.

I picked three search engines that use different technologies. Google and AltaVista use variants of crawler technology while Yahoo is a directory service. Say I want to find websites that provide industrial supplies. I will enter the two key words, industrial and supply, into the search box at each search engine site. In addition, I want to REALLY emphasize to the search engine that I want to include all sites with both words and not either word, so I will place a “+” sign in front of each word (see Example 1). Conversely, if I really want specific words not to show up in the results of my search, then I would place a “-” in front of the word(s) to be excluded.

Example 1 Search Box

It’s very important that your site shows up on the first page of the search results. Most people will not take the time to dig deeper to the subsequent search pages to find your site. The test yields thousands of results, but I will look only at sites that appear on the first results page on multiple search engines. Here are the ranking results:

As you can see, no two search engines are alike. Each use proprietary search methods to place sites in their indexes. It is up to the web site owners to strategically design sites to be found by all search engines and not just by one. For example, online giant Grainger.Com, ranked #4 in the Google search, but did not appear on the first page of the other two search engines. It looks like MSC Industrial Supply came out of this test strong with a top four placement in all tested search engines.

So maybe your niche market is bearings, lumber, fittings, or whatever. Do the test that I performed in the above example, but add your market specific keyword (i.e., +bearings) and browse the results. Do you see your company listed? Do you see any competitors listed instead of your company? Actually, everyone else who shows up as a search result is your competitor. They all have the potential of taking away business from existing or potential customers trying to find your site through a search engine. If this is the case, then you might want to re-think or even create a search engine placement strategy.

The point to remember here is to think like a customer trying to find your site. What are the top 10 things that you think your customers will be looking for? This content list of key words needs to be incorporated into your pages in ways for all search engines to find your site. Leave it up to your web-heads to research the individual search engine personalities and make the appropriate additions to your site. Another point is that search engines are updating themselves 24x7. Therefore, search results today may not be the same tomorrow. So part of the game is to constantly check your site’s ranking and make necessary adjustments to keep your site highly ranked.