Google Record Profits Highlight Effectiveness of Search Engine Traffic
As Google post net annual profits of almost $2billion, they have not only shown their own dominance of the online environment, but that search engines today are as strong as they’ve ever been.
The reason that most websites are able to source the vast majority of their traffic is by tapping into this extremely lucrative market. Whilst Google make their profits primarily from selling advertising space on their SERPs – through AdWords – website owners need to get traffic through their site to achieve their goals.
It doesn’t take a massive leap of imagination to determine therefore that your aspirations and those of the search engines actually mirror one another. A search engine needs people to pass through and click on adverts to ensure their income, you need targeted traffic; the more the merrier in both cases.
But search engines have to maintain certainly quality standards; competition in their field ensures this. Because Google have Yahoo!, Bing and a whole bevy of other pretenders waiting in the wings, it is in their best interest to provide the very best results to its users. This means filtering out spammy, poorly formatted sites with no optimisation from the top.
In the old days, before Google introduced PageRank, position within the SERPs was determined by your website’s content. Not by how good it was though, but by directly telling the search engines what to rank you for. This included contacting the engine in question to index a page and then filling it with keywords. Quality didn’t even come into consideration.
Now that search engine algorithms have gained a certain amount of autonomy and intelligence, you too have to be smarter with how you choose to market yourself. There’s a global audience at stake and plenty of clicks to your main money pages with it, just by getting yourself to the top of Google, Yahoo and Bing for your major search terms.
Competition may be strong, but by being thorough and ethical in your optimisation efforts, it is an achievable goal. But what you have to keep in mind is that you aren’t fighting against the search engines, but trying to please them.
Whilst they may publicly disown SEO techniques, search engines recognise that the best practice techniques employed by some are invariably helping them find better sites and provide users with what they’re looking for with greater ease.
Don’t forget, this is a mutually beneficial relationship that you’re involved with. Search engines can’t function without good content and they have to do everything possible to maintain their traffic and profit levels; ergo they need you. But, that said, you will be hugely dependent on search engines for the traffic that will help you succeed.
The good news for all parties though is that the search engines are healthier than ever and online traffic is increasing all the time. This means that you won’t be left high and dry if you get to the top of the rankings for your main terms; convoluted maybe, but the end result is as positive and as simple as you could hope.
