Search Engine Impact
From: Rod Aries It
is like the author Jonathan Franzen, who was selected to appear on
Oprah's Book Club, but snubbed Oprah. [Moderator's note: I.e., Oprah
Winfrey, top U.S. TV talk show host, syndicated around the world.]
Franzen worried about his place in the "high-art literary
tradition" and complained that the Oprah logo on his book
amounted to a "corporate" endorsement and wasn't really
"worthy" for his book because she wasn't a true critic.
Oprah then withdrew the offer, probably costing Franzen thousands and
thousands of sales. If you are in business, consider the search
engines as Oprah -- you want their endorsement, and the traffic they
bring.
But, I will agree that writing for the Internet is different than
writing for the real world. Viewers generally come to your site for a
different reason and want to be able to process that data in a manner
convenient to them -- not to read intensely profound works of
literature. ( More on this at http://www.howtointernet.com/net_copy_writing.html.
)
Marcia stated:
The greatest number of visitors are coming to my site via phrases for
which I am ranked either #1 or close to #1.
We own 10,000 domains and we market and monitor them closely. I
have a personal business site that I have had for about four years.
When I first built it, I was happy to get 300 visitors a month. Over
time I have worked hard to build up traffic, up to almost 100,000
unique visitors a month. For the last 10-12 months I have enjoyed a
number one ranking in a major Yahoo directory (not on a directory, but
on a search) and I have received 800-1,200 visitors a day from Yahoo
for this reasonably, frequently searched term.
About a month ago, I fell to the second slot, and then about a week
ago I fell to the third slot. My traffic, now in the number three
position, is now about 300-500 per day... In the number two spot I was
about 500-750 a day.
In short, I dropped down two spots and lost about 15,000 monthly
visitors to my site from Yahoo, or about 15% of my overall traffic for
this site.
It looks like, based on this isolated observation, that a 2nd
ranking may get about half of a top ranking, and a third ranking about
a third of the traffic a top ranked web page receives. Imagine how a
number 10 or number 25 ranking compares....
In short, Oprah would say, get ranked high, and let customers
decide what is "worthy."
At your service,
Rod Aries
How To Internet Your Business
Proven Internet Marketing Results For Business.
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