Visitors, part 2
Visitors, Where do they come from?
70 - 80% of web sessions start at a search engines. Even when the user knows a domain name the may still use Google to search for a site.
Google is the main search engine, especially in the UK, consistently producing the majority of search traffic. Yahoo and MSN are the next biggest search engines, but produce a much smaller proportion of visitors. Search engine optimisation must aim for Google listing, but we must also consider the different requirements of Yahoo and MSN.
There are a wide range of smaller search engines that we must also attain listings in as every listing for your site is another potential entrance.
In the past year the rise of a more interactive web 2.0 has produced more starting points for people’s web sessions. A modern site needs to interact with web on a constant basis to attain links from a range of online sources that are concentrating of fresh information and user voting, rather than content and link popularity that the search engines use.
Producing content that can be syndicated to produce back links to your site will improve your link popularity and search engine relevancy. Extending the network of sites that point to you is essential to gathering a larger proportion of referral traffic an improving search engine positions.
After 12 years of major search engines being around they list a lot of content, this content is ranked on it relevancy to a search term. The problem is as news articles age they get more links and so do the pages that link to them. Through aging and link popularity these news articles becomes increasingly relevant in the eyes of search engines. New News stories while relevant to the user may not be as relevant to the search engine, for this reason Google and the other search engines have added different search filters news search brings articles in date order bringing fresh content as a priority. There are other filters to search images, blogs, groups, products.