A new study on search engine user behaviour, underlines the importance of having your website ranked on the first few pages of the search engines for keywords.

“The iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study”, conducted by Jupiter Research, shows that search engine users are now a fickle bunch who are becoming better at using search engines to find relevant information.

Highlights from the report:

62% of search engine users don’t look past the first few pages of seach engine results

39% don’t look past the first page

82% of users attempt to refine their search

36% of users link placement to company prominence

In summary, the report demonstrates that unless your website is found in the first few pages, it is not going to be found.

Keyword usage is highly important, particularly longer, more specific terms.

Your company is often viewed as a ‘top’ company, if it is found in the first few pages of the search engines.

This report suggests that if you’re not ranking well for the right keywords, you’re missing out on highly qualified traffic.

The entire report can be downloaded from the iProspect website here (PDF).

Enquire here to discuss our search engine promotion services.

There are now more than 1.3 million registered .eu domain names, following Friday’s open shop. Friday was when any EU based person, or organisation had the opportunity to register their domain.

It really was a land rush with applications being made at an average speed of 76 per second.

At the time of publishing this article, the countries leading the table were:

Germany 419,503
Britain 270,105
Holland 154,371
Italy 81,289

About 1 million of the .eu domain names were registered since the general launch on Friday, with 335,000 of the applications being received during the sunrise period (by application prior to Friday), although 95,000 of these were duplicated.

Our own experience of the .eu availability has been one of annoyance. We registered www.thuk.eu during the sunrise period and have landed it, however we also registered a couple of domains on Friday morning. The domain registration company we use, showed availability for two domain names we wanted, which we registered and paid for. However, it seems as though these names have not been allocated to us, despite them showing in our hosting package.

What’s frustrating is that had we known these domain names were not available, we could have looked for similar names. Now, anything close to the names we wanted has gone!

I wonder how many other people will have similar disappointments?

Register your .eu domain name now

If you are having a website revamp, or completely changing your website design and structure, you may be concerned about the effect this will have on your website rankings.

We were recently asked by one of our readers what they can do to protect their rankings, when changing their website.

Here is some of the advice we provided…

When updating your website one of the main things to consider, is what is going to happen to all of the links that currently point to your website pages. It’s important to make sure that existing links to your site don’t get lost. Think of each link to a page on your site, as being regarded as a vote for that page by the search engines. The more links (votes) a page receives, the more important the search engines think your page is.

So what do we do?

If the new page URL (web address) is exactly the same as the old URL, there is no problem (Note: urls are case sensitive). However, if a page URL changes you have to make sure that any links you had to this URL aren’t lost.

To give an example:

Your page is currently

http://www.thuk.co.uk/blog

and lets say that on the new site its…

http://www.thuk.co.uk/pages/services/blogs.html

You will need to redirect any references to http://www.thuk.co.uk/blog to its new home at http://www.thuk.co.uk/pages/services/blogs.html

This must be done as a permanent redirect (your server administrator should be able to help you do this, if this is too technical).

This should be carried out for all pages on the old site unless the URL is absolutely identical. If a page on the old site has no direct equivalent on the new site, then it is could be directed to the home page.

You should delete the old pages after all the redirects are setup and working, as you don’t want search engines looking at them, or searchers accidentally visiting the old site.

If you just delete the old pages, peoples bookmarks may fail and you will lose some of your position in the search engines, as they drop non-existent URLS, hence the reason why they should be redirected.

Whilst you are on the topic of making these adjustments, you may also want to make sure that the webserver is setup correctly to handle the non www version of any URL, so that any link without the www prefix, gets redirected to the www version.

Example:

http://totallyinsuredgroup.co.uk

should be redirected to…

http://www.totallyinsuredgroup.co.uk

If you have any questions related to online marketing, post them as a comment and we will do our best to answer them. To enquire about our online marketing services, enquire here.