UNIT-1

Introduction to Search Engine

Some Basics about SEO
▪ SEO: Search Engine Optimization
▪ Why ?
▪ What ?
▪ How ?
Some of the famous Search Engines

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What is SEO?
▪ What is Search + Engine + Optimization?
▪ Search:try to find something
▪ Engine: mechanism
▪ Optimization:
▪ the action of making the best or most effective use
of a resource..

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SEO
▪ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of
affecting the visibility of a website or a webpage in a web
search engine’s unpaid results.
▪ It is the process of getting traffic from the “free”, “organic”
or “natural” search result on search engines.

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 OR
▪ In simpler terms Search Engine Optimization is a way to
improve your web site so that it will appear closer to the top
positions in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing or
other search engines.

▪ Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that

help your website rank higher in organic (or “natural”)
search results, thus making your website more visible to
people who are looking for your product or service via
search engines.

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 Why SEO is important?
▪ Why SEO is important?

▪ In today’s competitive market SEO is more important than ever.

▪ Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for
solutions to their problems.

▪ If you have a web site, blog or online store, SEO can help your business grow and meet the
business objectives.

▪ The majority of search engines users are more likely to choose one of the top 5 suggestions in the
results page so to take advantage of this and gain visitors to your web site you need to rank as
higher as possible.

▪ SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and
usability of a web site.
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Total number of Websites

▪ http://www.internetlivestats.com

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History of SEO

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The Mission of Search Engines
▪ The burden is on search engine to develop Relevant, Fast
and Fresh search
▪ Results should retrieved in least amount of time

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The Mission of Search Engines
▪ Since web searchers are free to use any of the many available search engines on
the Web to find what they are seeking, the burden is on the search engines to
develop a relevant, fast, and fresh search experience.

▪ For the most part, search engines accomplish this by being perceived as having
the most relevant results and delivering them the fastest, as users will go to the
search engine they think will get them the answers they want in the least amount
of time.

▪ As a result, search engines invest a tremendous amount of time, energy, and

capital in improving their relevance.

▪ This includes performing extensive studies of user responses to their search

results, comparing their results against those of other search engines, conducting
eye tracking studies 11
The Market Share of Search Engines

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 (cont.)
▪ In India and US, Google is dominant.
▪ In China, Baidu is the leading search engine.

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The Human Goals of Searching
▪ Obtain information
▪ Answer, solution, piece of data, study, surveys
▪ Looking for a website (navigational query)
▪ To buy something (transaction query)
▪ To learn something (informational query)

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Types of Query
▪ Looking for a website (navigational query)
▪ To buy something (transaction query)
▪ To learn something (informational query)

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Determining Searcher Intent:
A Challenge for Both Marketers and Search Engines
Navigational Queries:
▪ providing searchers with results that are relevant to their queries

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▪ A navigational query is a search query entered with the intent of
finding a particular website or webpage. For example, a user
might enter "youtube" into Google's search bar to find the
YouTube site rather than entering the URL into a browser's
navigation bar or using a bookmark.
▪ surfing directly to a specific website, user may not know the
exact URL

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Informational Queries:
▪ Informational search queries are simply looking for specific information
and have questions about a particular topic.
▪ In this, user is looking for certain information and not for a specific
company
Examples:
▪ local weather,
▪ maps and directions,
▪ Bollywood awards,
▪ cricket updates,
▪ Political, sports, general news,
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Informational Query
▪ For example; if you are looking for a shampoo that can help your hair
grow you might use a phrase like ‘hair growth shampoo’. This type of
query can result in a pretty long list since your list might include
various companies, product brands as well as review sites.

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Transactional Queries:
▪ This type of search query is focused on finding information on
transactions. Users want to know how to make a purchase or how to
order or how to find the best company from which to buy.
▪ this kind of request indicates that the user wishes to execute a
transaction– for example, “buy books” or “purchase an iPhone 6”.
▪ Example: creating a Gmail account, paying a parking ticket

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Adaptive Search
▪ Keeping track of users’ previous search queries and taking them into
account when determining which results to return for a new query—is
known as ADAPTIVE SEARCH—
▪ You can verify this by trying search sequences such as a search on Rajkot
followed by a search on hotels. Normally, a search on hotels would not
include results for hotels in Rajkot, but when the preceding query was for
Rajkot, some results for hotels in Rajkot will be included.
▪ Adaptive Search help the search engines to get a better sense of a user’s
intent.
▪ The search engines also look at sequences of search queries to determine
intention.
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How People Search
▪ Search engines invest significant resources into understanding how people use
search, enabling them to produce better (i.e., faster, fresher, and more relevant)
search engine results. For website publishers, the information regarding how people
use search can be used to help improve the usability of the site as well as search
engine compatibility.

▪ Data from comScore provides some great insight into what people actually search
for when they perform a search. Table shows a breakdown of many of the major
categories that people’s Internet searches fall into.

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This shows that people search
across a very wide number of
categories. Search engines are
used to find information in nearly
every portion of our lives.

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Eye Tracking: How Users Scan Results Pages
▪ Research firms Enquiro, Eyetools, and Didit conducted heat-map testing with search engine users
that produced interesting results related to what users see and focus on when engaged in search
activity

▪ Figure depicts a heat map showing a test performed on Google. The graphic indicates that users
spent the most amount of time focusing their eyes in the top-left area, where shading is the darkest.

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▪ This research study also showed that different physical positioning of on-screen search results
resulted in different user eye-tracking patterns.

▪ When viewing a standard Google results page, users tended(regularly) to create an “F-shaped”
pattern with their eye movements, focusing first and longest on the upper-left hand corner of the
screen;

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Eye Tracking: How Users Scan Results Pages
Blended Search
• In May 2008, Google introduced the concept of Universal Search.
• This was a move from simply showing the 10 most relevant web pages (now
referred to as “10 blue links”) to showing other types of media, such as videos,
images, news results, and so on, as part of the results in the base search engine.
• The other search engines followed suit within a few months, and the industry now
refers to this general concept as Blended Search.
• Blended Search, however, creates more of a chunking effect, where the chunks are
around the various rich media objects, such as images or video.
• Then they look at the text beside it to see whether it corresponds to the image or
video thumbnail
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▪ Figure shows what the eye-tracking pattern on a Blended Search page
looks like.

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Click Tracking:
How Users Click on Results, Natural Versus Paid

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▪ Natural Search: In search engines a natural search is one where results are returned
based on the natural indexing of the Web site.

▪ Organic search results are the web page listings that most closely match the user’s
search query based on relevance. Also called “natural” search results, ranking high
in the organic results is what SEO is all about.

▪ Paid Search: Paid search results are basically advertisements — the website owners
have paid to have their web pages display for certain keywords, so these listings
show up when someone runs a search query containing those keywords.

▪ The difference between organic search vs. paid search is simple: it’s the cost.

▪ While organic search focuses on unpaid rankings in search results, paid search
focuses on paid rankings. With organic search, companies use SEO to optimize
their site’s visibility or rankings in search results. In comparison, paid search allows
users to pay for a prominent spot in search results.

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How Users Click on Results, Natural Versus Paid (cont.)

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THANK YOU

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