newsletter

Special edition of the ABCs of Web Design Newsletter

Introductory comments

I have been working on my next article for my web column called “The Importance of the “Right” Keywords.” In this article, I am stressing how imperative it is to find the keywords that your target audience is using to find your site or all your SEO efforts are in vain. As many of you know who read my column, I use the projects I am working on as inspiration for my column topics, and as I told my boss, I can increase the traffic on the new site by 500% without a problem, but if this traffic is not looking for our products, then the sales will not increase. So in this special edition of my newsletter, I am proposing my own question to myself…

Question of the month

Question: How do people search?

Answer: I have been perplexed by this question for longer than I can tell you! And I have been searching for information on this subject as well and with no results. But as I was frequenting one of the many SEO forums I peruse daily, I found it! An actual study conducted on how people search! In my glee and jubilation, I greedily devoured every word. And here, ladies and gentlemen, are the results:

Name of the Study: Impatient Web Searchers Measure Web Sites' Appeal In Seconds

URL: http://www.psu.edu/ur/2003/websiteappeal.html

From the study: Web users are picky and impatient, typically visiting only the first three results from a query, with one in five searchers spending 60 seconds or less on a linked Web document, according to Penn State researchers.

“People make instantaneous judgments about whether to stay on a site, and if a site doesn't the give the right impression, users will bypass it," said Dr. Jim Jansen, assistant professor in Penn State’s information sciences and technology (IST). "A page has to be well-designed, easy to load and relevant to a searcher's needs."

Otherwise, by the time three minutes have elapsed, 40 percent of searchers will have moved on. While some may have found what they wanted, others may simply have given up and moved to a different site, said the faculty member in Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).

To improve the odds Web users will visit a site, Jansen said it is imperative to get indexed by all search engines. A site's abstract that appears on the results page also can direct more users to a site -- provided the description is enticing and relevant specifics about the site are included.

"For site developers, if you want to be looked at, it is absolutely critical that the abstract be crystal clear about the purpose of your Web site," Jansen said. "Eight out of 10 times, the abstract dissuades people from going to the site."

Several patterns emerged. Half of all users entered only one query with 54 percent viewing just one page of results in each session (a session was a query or series of queries submitted by a user during one interaction with a Web search engine). Only an additional 19 percent went on to the second page in sessions, and fewer than 10 percent of users bothered with the third page of results.

With more businesses opting to market through search engines rather than ads, those percentages illustrate why a good ranking on a major Web search engine can make the difference between commercial success and failure.

Wrap up

Finally – a study to back up what I have been saying all this time! I hope you find this information useful. Email me with any questions! Thanks for reading my newsletter.

Please send all questions to theresaw@columbus.rr.com.

Click here to view the articles from my print web column. Click here for my SEO article series.

Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be interested in it.