Thanks to Landon @ ejustic.com for providing me with this information. I'm very pleased with the company, who has designed sites for my office, including bonescandal.com:
This is taken from an email of this morning ...
Google’s share of the U.S. searches performed reached 49% in March of this year, while Yahoo’s total search share was 22% and MSN received 11% of total search volume.
Can you remember back to the late 90’s when Google was a baby and Yahoo, Lycos, Hotbot, AOL, AltaVista, Excite and several others were well entrenched players? How did Google, who entered a fiercely competitive industry late in the game, garner such a dominant market share?
Google was able to earn hordes of converts, build deep loyalty and eventually become a household name (“Google it” is now part of our lexicon) because they made our lives easier by bringing us the information we were seeking quickly and efficiently. Their mission has always been providing us the information that is most relevant to our keyword search. Their success in doing so makes them the number one option in search.&nb! sp;
To see an illustration of Google’s dedication to improving your search for information, compare the home pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google.com contains the search bar, logo and some relevant links. Other than that, it is a blank page! It is obvious what they want you to do: search. The Yahoo and MSN homepages are filled with ads, entertainment gossip, news stories, sports updates, weather information and more clutter that begs for your attention. Your eye has to search for the search bar. Google has the disciplined focus of getting people the relevant information they seek.
Google solved a huge problem we had with other engines. If you can recall the early days of search, you will probably remember times that you tried a few different keyword searches and dug through several pages of results before finding any useful information. Google became the only search engine we needed because they! were the best at matching our search query with the content o! f websit es. The keywords we type tell Google what information we desire. They search their enormous database of websites for matches and rank the sites based on relevance.
Since Google’s algorithm for ranking websites is based on relevance, you need to make your website relevant if you want people to find you. Two of the key factors Google uses in determining your relevance are the links that point to your website and the content (text) on your web pages. Links tell Google that your site is probably important and helpful because other websites about similar topics consider your site an authority. Content is the information you provide your readers. Google’s robots are programmed to read your website’s content. The data it collects is processed through Google’s algorithm.
Therefore, if you want people interested in “defective widgets that cause spinal injury” to find your website when they search Google, you had better create page(s) of content specifically discussing defective widgets that cause spinal injury. It is not good enough to simply discuss that your practices helps people who’ve suffered injuries in one section, and that you handle defective product lawsuits in another section. Create content giving helpful information for the exact problem you can help people address. The more specific you are about defective widget spinal injuries, the more relevant you are to people with that problem. The more relevant you are the higher Google will rank you, meaning that more people will find you when they search for information on the topic. Figure out what specific type of clients you would like to earn, and create pages of content tailored to helping them.
