Search Queries – Navigational Search Queries

SEO is done with the purpose of presenting your website on the search engine platter to the viewers with particular intents. Semantic search features have taken the best time away from the SEOs who made their websites appear on the top with the purpose of bringing in more web traffic. Thus the result of more click through, lesser unique visitors and even lesser customers. At many times these websites failed to foster good conversions and the owners of the website questioned the usefulness of the web for business.

We have been discussing the nature of search queries. We have studied the informational search query. We also understand by now that how do customers who are willing to make purchase search. Such transaction search queries mean a lot to the website owner. The SEO strategy must be based on the search query that the web surfer key in.

This means that we must optimize our site to fit the 3 types of search queries:

• The informational search query
• The transactional search query
• The navigational search query

With the power of the search engines to understand the intent, it is most important for the optimizer too, to understand the type and quality of the search results. Thus making sure that the conductor of the search reaches the destination with ease.

Navigational Search Query is the decisive search query that helps the web visitor to reach the destination with one click. If you are a brand, the website visitor is searching using the navigational search query will lead him to the exact website search results. Google we have learnt has reduced the number of search results for navigational search queries. At occasions like these we see the search results on the first page (SERP) reduced to 7 instead of 10.

Owning the navigational search query will help, state the experts, in appearing in the organic search result as well as if we buy the keywords to appear in the sponsored listing.

Search Queries – Learn the types

Just yesterday we were discussing transactional search queries. We know for a fact that serious buyers too, surf the net, though lesser in numbers than the visitors who are there to learn and to retrieve information about the product and services. It is but natural. We are all learners at first before we make the buying decision and get ready to get our credit cards swept.

When we are conducting a broad based search like “cheapest laptops”, “laptop offers” we are actually searching for all types and all brands of laptops available. Here we want to know about the brands, different laptop models and their prices before we actually want to narrow down on one particular brand. These types are informational queries. Here they are not keying in the brand name, or are looking for a particular site i.e.: http://www.dell.com.

Almost all of us go through this phase. Our aim is to be helpful to the web visitors and let them go through their learning curve. The aim of the website owners if to get as many visitors as possible and then skillfully lead them to buy.

What do we do to lead the visitors to our web pages? Take it easy from here. We need to present ourselves as honest, trusting source that provides quality information. We must aim to present ourselves as authorities so that the visitors place more trust in our web content and our web pages. We need to:

• Blog about the products – one at a time, not cram in all the information in one go and make ourselves look miserable
• Business news releases help in steering interest of the web surfer looking for information on the product and marketing offers.
• Educated the buyers about what to look for, about the important features that could help them to buy the good product, a step by step guide would be helpful.
• A video – the how to “YouTube” video would help too in this respect.

Working out on positing ourselves on the internet and the search engine results to get more inquirers coming to our web pages would also lead many buyers to come and relearn. We know for a fact the by providing quality information visible on the search engines, we could force a change in buying decisions.

Conversions – People who transact, how do they search?

It is about time we should study user queries that lead to conversions, that is, queries that lead to transactions. When people are ready to buy, what sort of queries they made, hence, leading to purchase. It’s important isn’t it? While working with SEO the intent based search results do play an important role. This semantic search result will have more say in the coming year.

I asked this question the other day when I met the group of SEO experts. The reply was interesting and I thought it would benefit everyone. So here we go.

“These are called the transactional queries. The purchase decision had either, already been made or the surfer is about to made his or her decision. The intent is there and hence the queries might include the words like buy, order or the exact brand name might be keyed in during the search and the local search might be embedded in the query. We can explain the search for the “cheapest air fare from Virginia to Florida” could explain the intent. If the person is not ready to get is credit card swept right away, he is on the verge of making a decision. These types are transactional queries and carry a greater chance of conversion.”

This explains some facts and it would be easier now for most of us to articulate our web content to help in conversions.

This explanation also leads us to conclude that once we understand the transactional queries, we can do certainly take the big piece of cake by signing up for the sponsored search results. Make use of the real estate alongside the organic queries. The purchaser’s intent is to click through every possible clickable link that can lead to a cheaper and better purchase. He loves his money more than he loves the seller; hence, we can take a chance on this fact and get rolled out in PPC adverts. People, we study, tend to click on the PPC ads if they have decided to buy.

Author Rank

It seems that the master search engine has always kept its promise. It always surprises us and gifts us with something new and more challenging. We had promised in our previous posts that there will be new things on the SEO horizon coming New Year. The year ends today and Google gives us the surprise.

Content as we know as always ruled the internet world. Original, fresh and healthy content has always been valued more, weighed more and had been favored by Google. Now, once again Google says that you need to be creative, original and develop new informative content and get it ranked well. This time the master search engine has come up with Google AuthorRank. For those who are familiar with the Google Page rank, this might come up as a surprise. Yes. You need to come with the fresh, original and healthy content, not just the web page content, Google talks about every bit of new text that you place on the search engine for your search engine marketing purpose.

We need to be on the Google+. Here content that has harnessed natural links is considered to be written by the expert author. The Google+ contributor’s section is the place where you need to put up the blogs and places where you are placing your written content. Bloggers, now have new place to put up there blogs names, thus creating a relationship with the search engines and hence the authors name and profile image shows up in the results. Not bad, but you need to have an author, the person who had the power of creating powerful informative content.

SEO, it’s not about running the magic lamp

There is no rubbing of the magic lamp. There is no jinnee and there is no magic in SEO. It’s just plain and simple hard work. We need to have understanding of the search engine algorithm and read through the tutorials that are spread over the web teach us about getting search engine visibility.

Keyword Density – This was the name of the game. The more relevant keywords used in the website content, the fast indexing and ranking could be achieved. This was past. Density is not longer the worry. In fact, the higher density of the keywords now can be categorized as keyword stuffing. We are no longer in the league of making things happen by tricking the search engines with keywords.

Back links – These are still important as they were earlier, but the rule of the game is changed. We still need many inbound one way links pointing towards our web pages, but we need more quality link. Not just any link would do. So it time to say good bye to the link farms or linking methods that get us many links. Here the game has titled more towards the quality of the links that we get.

Meta Tags – Keyword Meta tag has lost all its importance. Meta Title tag and Meta Description Tag are of a lesser interest to the Google and to the Bing, yet are still important from the SERP point of view as the search engines display the title and description tag for the views when processing results for the web visitors.

H1 Tags – This was supposed to be the most important element when we designed the website content. The role of H1 is of presenting your most important line of the text that could attract the visitor’s attention. It used to be the important on Page SEO element. Our brothers – The SEO experts killed it. As someone very rightly said, SEO’s spammed it to the death.

SEO now is really about hard honest work with the web pages to make them search engine friendly. We know the intent of our work. We must understand the intent of the web users when we sit to optimize our web pages as the days of semantic search have started to arrive.

2102 SEO Review

Wasn’t the year 2012 eventful in terms of SEO? Google did knock out some of the heavy weight web pages out of the search horizon. The year started off with a somber note but the SEO activists at the search giant’s office were busy knitting their web. They wanted to give more purposeful information to the web users. The word came out nearing the mid of the passing year that website owners and the SEO strategists need to be careful with their SEO work must not overdo their optimization efforts and must refrain from the unethical SEO practices.

The search giant was serious. It was proved from the Panda and the Penguin updates that the masters of the search were serious with what they were saying. The users of the web, the people surfing the net were the beneficiaries of the updates. These helped them to arrive at the more informative and purposeful sites other than those that were unethically optimized and those that contained Google Ad Sense adverts. Though some such websites are still there, smiling at the face of the web users, making mockery of the sincere efforts being made.

Google did actually write to the webmasters warning them and telling them that their websites would be penalized if the unethical links would not be removed. This meant lowering the authority and the ranking of the websites.

The year 2012 wraps up in few days from now. Leaving the SEO trends with:

• The Penguin updates
• Personalized searchers
• Google Places
• Google +
• Over optimization penalties

The things that remained common throughout are the keywords which make the base for the SEO. The relevance of the keywords to the web content and to the purpose of the website and the market niche remains to be central.

Yet Google came up with the semantic search results where the artificially intelligent Google BOTs decipher the intent of the search, break into the meaning of the content rather than indexing them for the mere words and produce the results in front of the web visitor giving out more purposeful results.

This means that the keywords are about to lose their importance? We have to wait and see what the New Year brings for us. In terms of SEO and search engine marketing we might be in for some more surprises.

SEO – Opening new gateway for e-commerce

With the internet the whole new world of business and ecommerce took birth. The beginning was slow enough as everyone went into the trial and testing mode. It quite a few quite when the marketers saw a new horizon taking birth. To their astonishment, the free bees, low cost dream started to get fulfilled.

The commerce ball game started off, with the email marketing spree, went to the website designing and over the years the birth of search engines took place. Yahoo led the way, with MSN to follow and then the big Bang, Google started to make waves and started to dominate the internet scene. We saw the website era change from the text based sites to the fully interactive multimedia sites. The fight for top search engine placements grew fierce.

Now SEO (search engine optimization) strategies lay the foundation for your web business flight. It is how correctly you figure of the relevant keywords, phrases and the long tail ends. The rank your website achieves for the low competitive keywords and for the highly competitive keywords. How efficiently have you chosen the relevant keywords that would help you to convert the visitor to the customer marks your success and failure in the web marketing game.

SEO relates to every element of the website design of your company. The text, the images, the videos, the anchor text, “Alt” image texts etc and yes, the domain name, the Meta Tags too form the heavy weight SEO elements that have to be taken care of, while developing the SEO plan for your search engine marketing strategy.

Visibility here is the name of the game. You need to be prudent and get into the ethical SEO practices if you need to survive and open your gateway to commerce and trade.