When it comes to directing people’s attention, there has never been anything as powerful as today’s vast online search engines, and when it comes to search engines, nobody can touch Google, whose sites handle an estimated 88 billion queries a month, roughly two-thirds the world total.
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Users don’t have any idea how Google decides the order in which it presents search results, and that ranking is the most consequential thing Google does. That’s because search engines may look far and wide, but their users do not. If your company doesn’t show up at or near the top of Google’s results, it’s invisible.
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A survey last May by the online advertising network Chitika found that the No. 1 search result drew over one-third of all traffic the results generated — twice as much as No. 2, three times the traffic of No. 3. Being on the first page of rankings was critical. Even No. 10, at the bottom of page 1, drew nearly two and a half times the traffic of No. 11, at the top of the second page.
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So any retailer that wants to reach customers online cares intensely about its rankings, and is eager for ploys to ensure prominence. Hence the business of SEO — search engine optimization. SEO is focused on figuring out Google’s rankings and giving Google what it’s looking for. Which is what? Only Google knows, and its search methodology is about as widely shared as the formula for Coke.
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What is known is that Google puts great weight not just on traffic flows, but on how well regarded a particular site is, and tries to measure that regard by calculating the number, and to some extent, the quality of other sites that link to it. Google likes to think it is reflecting some prevailing judgment of a site’s…