My thesis â€Search Engines: Can Visibility In Search Results Be Correlated To Increased Visitors and Higher Sales For E-tailers†was published in 2000. At that time, the web had been in existence for less than a decade, with widespread public adoption of five or six years. It’s hard to imagine how primitive things were during those initial years: Mosaic and Netscape Navigator were browsers of choice (although Internet Explorer rose out of Mosaic) and web sites were static. Two things we take for granted today were in place even then and my curiosity was piqued in terms of the potential relationship between the two. As the world wide web expanded, the need to catalogue and track this mass of information led to the foundation of search engines. Google was there by 1998, but before it arrived on the scene, others like AltaVista and WebCrawler dominated. Companies that advertised sales or services or even conducted business online (the so-called â€E-tailersâ€) were also present. How did the search and online sales relate to each other? Of course it now seems obvious that traffic generated by search engines has a significant impact on web site hits and increased visitors typically translate into increased sales. The question now is can that relationship be fine-tuned? This article is basically an overview of my current research. I would like to quantify the effect that search engine optimization services have on the traffic that a web site receives. In particular, there are several areas that we believe we understand, but hard numbers are difficult to come by (in part because there have been few web sites launched and then optimized using the protocol of a controlled experiment). My team is actively working on scenarios designed to address the following questions: 1. What the respective values are of targeted vs. non-targeted hits? In other words, how much more valuable are legitimate hits directed to a site as a result of effective SEO compared to misdirect or accidental directs? 2. What is the effect of traffic on a web site when linked to from other sites? Is there a variation in effectiveness attributable to perceived quality of the originating site? 3. Can a general formula be developed that accurately predicts traffic increases according to SEO investment? It’s well-known that quality SEO has a positive impact on traffic for a web site, but I hope to produce a formula companies can use to illustrate just how valuable that investment might be.
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