Jojo’s World

Its been a couple of years now since I started working on web, especially on search but its quiet strange that I started to dig “what is search?‘ just recently(lack of time may be the reason).  So far I and my friends were working on some web projects, we were trying to build that up, bring traffic (we were successful in those attempts really) and @ the same time we were building our company Techseol Web Solutions up. If you fail to FOCUS on what you are doing, you will end up no where (thats what I learned so far!)

I am making a humble attempt to answer “What is search?” from my very small experience on this industry so far.

How search happens?

We always “search” to find an answer to a question in our mind.  When ever we need to know about something the easy solution is “search”. You will get your answers in Google or Yahoo or Live or @ some other places. When ever we finds an answer we stop searching because we have reached where we want to. I think that’s the whole basic idea of search.

How to utilize searches?

A search always ends @ an answer or a solution. Humans always love who helps them with a solution @ the right time. So in a way they love the search engine (mostly Google) who helped or guided him/her to an answer. They will keep in mind that “Google/Yahoo/Live gave me an answer so I am gonna use that again”. But the ultimate HUG will be received by the website/blog/wiki who provided him/her with the right solution. Here comes the importance of writing informative/useful articles in your website because it always leads to a HUG by the searcher. They may pay a return visit in future, they may share that blog with their friends, they may bookmark in social medias etc etc.

See 1 guy who payed a visit to your website is = 1 unique visitor = 1 valuable customer of your business.

If you are number 1 in Google for a particular search term say “How to compress a file” and you are getting 158 unique visitors a day from this particular term alone. If you can provide a COMPELLING article on that topic “How to compress a file” answering all the questions, you are making sure that you retains all that 158 customers+expecting more visitors by the reference of these peoples (each day). On the other hand if you are giving a worth less article you are making sure that you will not get the same customer again+no referals + bonus chances of putting your site down in search wikis.

How much searches happen?

Well, even Google can’t answer this exactly. There’s millions of billion searches happening each day. Always keep in mind that 1 searcher = 1 potential customer. I think by localizing things I might be able to give an idea about the volume of searches happening.

Case 1: Global search-Term “laptops”

From the figure its easy to understand that term “laptops” has a search volume (number of searches) of 13,600,000 per month.  This means around 4,500,00 unique searches happening a day in Google globally for the term “laptops”. So if you are the #1 result for term “laptops” in Google you gets exposed to that much inbound customers (targeted) a day, increasing the sale chances.

There arises a question always, what this search is happening for? Obviously not all  4,500,00 people searching for “laptops” intend to buy one. Their intentions diversifies, they might be looking for reviews,for comparisons,for price tariffs,for pictures etc. It Varies!

But more focused search term “buy laptops” has a different meaning. Those customers might be interested to buy a laptop, they might be looking for sources of buying a laptop etc. It also varies but I can say they are more focused and higher % of conversion to sale possibility exists. When search gets focused search volumes also gets reduced. Compared to “laptops” the term “buy laptops” has only 1800 searches happening a day. But always keep in mind its better to get focused on your industry rather than widening. Widening is a good concept when its viewed in terms of advertising. For ex: If sites of Sony or Dell or Hp can get #1 in Google for term “laptops” they can deliver a targeted advertising to  4,500,00 unique peoples a day free of ad cost! How sweet is that?

Giving more focus to search terms, we can see searches also happen for different models of laptops like Dell Xps M1330 or Sony Vaio Vgn CS 21 etc. These searchers are highly focused either to know more about a particular laptop or know its review or to see some photos or for a “buy”-a sale! From figure we can understand that “Dell Xps” has around 27,300 serches a day while higly focused “Dell Xps M1330″ has only 3700 searches happening a day.

Well I talked about only some 4 or 5 search terms only. Think about numerous jumbling s of these terms, infinite number of combination’s of search terms, different types of terms that can arise in a searchers mind like “clean laptop” comparison terms like “sony v/s dell” “is dell bad?” etc etc etc. Billions of searches happen a day about “laptops” and its various combinations alone. See how big search is!

Case 2: Regional search-Localised to a City

See lets take the same example of “laptops” but instead of thinking global lets go Local. Lets take a city of Chicago. From data it shows that the term “laptops chicago” has 1300 searches a month. These customers might be searching for laptop shops in Chicago or laptop service centres in chicago or they may be searching for some laptop showrooms in Chicago to see their model of choice in real (not as a digital image in computer monitor). Also the term “laptop repair chicago” has 1000 unique searches happening a month. Now think of the different cities in Usa, different countries, states etc etc. Know how big search is!

My aim was to answer “What’s the basic idea of search” with a perspective that might be helpful to webmasters,search marketers and all those related peoples.

Its a common mistake or a type of avoidal that most SEO people will do, they dont Optimize their site for images. I dunno why this happen always and why many are still not so aware of this great oppurtunity to pump a load of traffic to your website. Optimisaing Images in your site will bring you a load of traffic via search engines. A recent conference conducted by Search Engine Strartegies concurred that “image search is the fastest growing vertical in the search arena today. Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL. All in the “Big 5″ have a search vertical dedicated specifically to image results, with 3 of them (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) integrating images into some contextual search results.”

How to optimise your images?

Thats the question! How to optimise your images, so that your site/blog gets a good visibility in Search Engines? Answer is simple, only requirement is be aware of certain facts & criterias that Search Engines consider while indexing images.

1. Use JPG format for all your photos & GIF format for all other graphical representations. Search Engines index JPG images a lot more compared to other formats.
2. Use ORIGINAL pictures – always! Upload it to your server, integrate your Logos, Trademarks etc.
3. Naming the Image is a great technique. Name the image in most Search Friendly manner. Eg: If you are writing a post about filmstar Aishwarya Rai or Angelina Jolie, upload an image of same people, then NAME that image like “Angelina Jolie photo” or “Angelina Jolie pic” or just “Angelina Jolie”. Similarly if you are writing a technology article realted to Windows vista, just upload a vista image – after renaming it as “Windows Vista tips” or “Windows vista tweaks” . Use your sense & find out more!
4. TAGS – can do a good help in optimising images. Write the most appropriate TAGS for your images. Eg: If its a post related to Windows vista, use TAGS like “Windows”, “Vista” “Windows Vista” etc.
5. DESCRIPTION:- Write a small (20 to 30 words) description about your topic. It must be relevent or matching with the article you are writing.
6. Including 4 or 5 images of same nature ( i mean related to a single topic) in your article will do good. Search Engines will think you are giving a small gallery of topic. Name all those images related. (Dont use same names for all images)
7. Give an apt TITLE for your image. Title can be same as Image Name itself. No problem but if you can find some other options better!
8. Use THUMBNAIL of the image in your main article & LINK to Larger Image from thumbnail.
9. Always use a good resolution image like 800*600 or more good than that.
10. If you can Optimise the image page – it will also do a lot good. Add some “one liners” small descriptions etc on the image page. More over it will be damn great if you can enable “COMMENTING” option in the image page. All the comments will add to content volume in the image page leading to more optimisation.

Additional Techniques:

1. Add a RATING option for your image. This will increase the interactivity & Search Engines always love User Interactive pages.

2. HOT LINKING your image page is another option. Eg: If you are running a celebrity site, COPY the image page of some filmstar say “Helen Hunt”. Now goto many related forums,blogs etc & LINK to this page from those forums by starting threads, replying to posts, making comments etc. If you are a Technology webmaster or something else, Go & find out Forums,Social medias, Blogs etc related to your TOPIC & LINK back.

3. Increase LINK to this image from your own site. Eg: You are writing an article on Windows Vista – at the end of article LINK to one of your images or to entire gallery with an anchor text like: “VIEW PICTURES OF WINDOWS VISTA” Sure! It will do good.

4. Hot Link from popular image sharing sites like Flickr,imageshack etc.

Its 100% guaranteed that with a good effort in optimising all the images in your site, you can drive an additional 30% traffic from searches alone. Sites related to Entertainment,Celebrities,Photos,Pictures,Wallpapers,Travel Blogs,Tourism etc can get 70% increase in traffic with effective Image optimisation.

A Tip to Bloggers:

Now on ADD a single image atleast in each of your posts (relevant-apt to content) – optimise it according to my above tips and SEE the DIFFERENCE!

COMMENT BELOW IF YOU HAVE MORE TIPS!!