Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [17]
Chapter Contents
The Big Picture
Understanding the Vocabulary
How Search Engines Used to Work
The Big Picture
Search engines have transformed marketing. If they didn’t have such an impact, you would not be reading this book.
A little less than two decades ago, all marketing was considered a “push” medium. TV commercials, billboards, radio ads, yellow pages, magazine ads—all advertisements were meant to be there regardless of whether you needed the message. It was all meant to reach that person who might need the service at that time.
Enter the search engine, the revolutionary technology that meets people at the point of their need. At the time, it was the only technology where the consumer told someone what they wanted at that specific point in time. If your company could be found in that decision point, your chances of gaining a new customer were very high. Your company met the customer at the point of their need, and thus an industry was born.
This has changed significantly from the early days of search. I’ll explain the early days later in this chapter, because those early days are the source of a lot of current misunderstandings and bad habits.
Let’s start with how things work right now. Figure 2-1 shows the search cycle.
Figure 2-1: How search engines work
Simply put, a search engine makes a copy of your web pages and stores that copy into a data center. This is the first obstacle in website marketing—making sure that the search engine has your website in its database. If it doesn’t, it will never show up in the rankings.
When a user performs a search (regardless of the search engines, because they all run on this basic premise), the search is made of the documents contained in the search engine’s database. That search returns a list of links to web pages and documents based on the factors in the ranking algorithm. The results are then displayed on the search engine results page (SERP).
Figure 2-2: Search engine results page from Ask.com
What the searcher is being shown on the results page are links to web pages. However, those links are the product of archived data; the document (or page) that the search engine lists in the results, from its database, may not be the actual document (or page) that is live on the Web. The distinction is critical, and you may have experienced it. Have you ever clicked a result in the SERP and received a “page not found” error? (See Figure 2-3.)
Figure 2-3: Error 404, “page not found” message
You get this error page, or something very similar, when you choose a link from the SERP but the live page is not available. What has happened is that the page is downloaded into the search engine’s database and is relevant enough to gain rankings; however, for some reason, that page no longer exists or has been removed from the live website.
You do not go to the live page until you click the link; your browser then requests the actual document, and then you see the live page. The main issue is that the search engines download a copy of your website to their server. They need that copy in order to rank your web pages according to their algorithm. If they are not able to download a copy of your website, then your site will not show up in the search engines.
And that is really what the search engines are—massive data banks that store a duplicate copy of all the websites they can find. The ranking algorithm is used against all the downloaded copies of web pages, not the live pages.
In the past few years, SERPs have changed and will continue to evolve past the typical text-based list of sites recommended for your search. Currently, the search results will change based on what you might be searching for.
People
A search for Bing Crosby on Microsoft’s Bing shows the integration of