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Understanding Search Engines (activity)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

November 11, 2005 [3655 views]

This week I want to give you some more questions about the site for your case study. In particular, I want to build on the lecture and get you thinking about traffic and search engines (as without traffic there are no customers) and search engines are now the main way of getting traffic.

Here are some new tools that might help (or just amuse you)?

Here are this week’s questions. Make notes on paper on in Word before you fill in the survey. Also as you are working try and build yourself a mental model of how the search engines work and why they are so important.

Which site are you examining?
Which keywords does the home page currently list highly for? (list as many as you can)
How can you tell?
What keywords should the home page list highly for? (list as many as you can)
Which of these keywords is likely to be the most successful?
Explain your answer
Who are the competitors? (make a note of 3 URLs)
How do the competitors compare in terms of keywords?
Does the site use a “landing page strategy”?
What is the PageRank for your current site?
How would you define the term PageRank?
How do the competitors compare in terms of reputation?
Give 3 specific suggestions (with examples) as to how you could help this company improve its PageRank?

The deadline is Wednesday at midnight (as usual) and this week there will be NO extensions.

Here is a link to the survey for reporting back this week's activity in case you don't get the email.

Recent comments:

On November 12, 2005 at 1:51 PM, k0226061 wrote:

i am trying to do this weeks activity, but there are no keyword listings for the site i chose?!

http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/seotoolkit/keyword_density_analysis.asp

Jonathan replies: Does that mean that your site has no keywords or that the tool does not find any? I suspect the former. If that is the case then you have a strong case for improving the sites visibility by introducing a keyword strategy.

On November 14, 2005 at 7:21 AM, Mitul wrote:

Hi,

Assuming my company is called 'Fast Food'...

When I am making suggestions for Keywords would I use:

Keyword 1: 'Fast Food'
Keyword 2: 'Fast'
Keyword 3: Food'

Or all three of them? I hope that makes sense

Jonathan replies: It does make sense but think about this from a customer point of view (imagine them searching). They are not going to expect to see your company by typing "fast" or "food" (getting listed highly for food will be impossible). Think harder about what words your target audience really will type.

On November 14, 2005 at 3:02 PM, k0226061 wrote:

isnt any word on the landing page a keyword? doesnt the search engine go through the pages and picks up the word the user is looking for? the tool couldnt find any! i looked at competitors and they had alot!

Jonathan replies: A word mentioned once is unlikely to work as a keyword. It needs to be mentioned more than once; in titles, headings, META tags, ALT tags and link names.

On November 15, 2005 at 12:36 AM, rahul wrote:

i have tried using several tools to give me some guide, an estimate on the site traffic. several tools only displayed no information/no data... I have decided to use this company for my case study, perhaps theres no traffic because its a brand new, fresh company other tools displayed. there are some results on words and pharases used. would you still say the go ahead to use this compay for the case study? Co. OfficeMOBILE. www.yourofficemobile.com

http://www.jonathanbriggs.com/courses/ecommerce2005/feedback-on-search-engine-activity,467,BA.html

Jonathan replies: see my comments in this weeks feedback

On November 16, 2005 at 5:27 PM, k0322744 wrote:

what should one do if there is no keyword for the website. As I have tried looking for the keyword at, http://www.seotoolkit.co.uk/seotoolkit/keyword_density_analysis.asp. But the result I got was 'The URL does not use a recognized protocol/
seotoolkit/keyword_density_analysis.asp, line 243'

Jonathan replies: Perhaps there is a bug in the site you are evaluating. You do not tell me what site this is so it is difficult for me to tell.

What do you think?

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This site is an educational resource, a research project and a publication channel written by Jonathan Briggs, Professor of eCommerce at Kingston University.
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