We believe that a “top ten” ranking is not good enough. Here is why.

As with most non-regulated sectors, search engine optimization has its unwritten industry standards. One of those unwritten standards is what we call “the fallacy of the top ten”. In a misguided attempt to sell their services, and then prove that they are effective, many SEO firms focus on getting as many top-ten rankings for your search terms as possible. On the surface, this seems like an effective strategy, which is why they do it. And because you, the client, can’t be expected to know any better, it makes for a great sales pitch.

It’s also baloney, and we don’t buy it. Here is why. Several studies have come out showing a wide gap between the number one ranked website and the number two ranked website. How wide a gap? One study that tracked both user eye movements and user clicks found that 42% of searchers clicked on the top-ranked site, even though most of those people had actually looked at other listings, some even scrolling down before returning to click on the top-ranked website. In that study, just eight percent of searchers clicked on the number two ranked website. Other studies since have confirmed a similar gap between the top ranked website and the second ranked website.

Here is a screenshot that shows where people typically look at a search screen. Obviously if your website shows up where people look, you stand a better chance of making a sale than if it shows up somewhere else. And that somewhere else includes the “top ten” listing so many SEO specialists brag about.

Here is an example of how this has inspired us to run a more effective SEO marketing campaign for you.

Suppose that you have 25 search terms your website is targeting. Suppose further that you rank between 6 and 10 at Google for 5 of them, but for the other 20 search terms you languish somewhere on the second, third or even lower pages of Google’s listings.

Here is what most SEO firms will do: they will try to boost the remaining 20 search terms so that they can report to you the most impressive-sounding number of top-ten rankings possible. That is where they will focus. While boosting your ranking for those 20 terms is a good thing, the focus is not.

Here is what this SEO firm will do: we will focus our primary attention on boosting further your rankings for the five search terms you already rank for in the top ten. Why, because there is more ROI (profits) for you in getting top-three billing, and way more in getting number one ranking for even one search term than getting a number nine nor ten ranking for a dozen search terms.

We could take the easy route and try to impress you…or we could take the time to help you understand how to profit best from search engine optimization and work together as a team.

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Google Strives to Further Improve Search Functionality

Despite Google’s dominant position in the search industry, the internet giant’s decision makers insist that search is not a “solved problem,” and that there is still much room for improvement.“Our position is that search is a very hard problem. We have still a lot of work to do,” commented internal engineer, Douglas Merrill, noting that 70% of Google’s efforts still go into improving search, as opposed to developing other services.“It is not enough to have the information, the information should be right,”

Merrill went on to say. “Sometimes the problem is figuring out what the users mean, not what the user said.”At this point, some of Google’s main projects include improving mobile web search, personalized search, and language translation features, as well as finding new ways to combat SEO spam.

By keeping its focus on core search functionality, the internet giant is demonstrating its belief that no search algorithm can be “too good,” while recognizing the continual progress of competitors. This goes to show that even the mighty Google must work hard to maintain the upper hand against rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft.

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Google SearchTechnology-Google searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results.

Google searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results. IntroductionGoogle runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's we've networked together to create a superfast search engine.The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.
PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query.

So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.Integrity Google's complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult. And though we may run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a particular or higher placement). A Google search provides an easy and effective way to find high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.

via: topseoservices

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