Watching the rankings of your relevant keywords is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts. However, before you get too obsessed with that number, realize that rankings aren’t always what they seem — in fact here we see an example where ranking #3 is actually exactly the same as ranking #1.
Optify has released new research of over a million click-throughs in an attempt to predict what percentage of people click on the first result of Google, vs the second, third, etc. We’ve seen research like this before dating back to 2006, but this is certainly the most recent research, and with the changing face of Google results — with social, images, and media as well as geo-targeted search — it’s always good to see recent research. Interestingly, the Optify study shows the lowest click through percentage for the number one Google position of any study to date.
In 2006, AOL leaked search data of over 35 million search queries, including exactly how many people clicked on search results based on the ranking. This data has become the most commonly quoted statistics for Google click distribution — even though it did not come from Google results. Today we take a look at this AOL data, and the areas in which Google click distribution is probably different from this 5 years old AOL data.
One of the most frequent questions were hear from people just learning about SEO is “will paid links help my site?” Find out what Google has to say on the subject of paid links, and what the exceptions to Google’s policy really are.
SEO basics tackles the question of whether to use hyphens or underscores for your SEO URLs. There’s a surprising amount of debate over this topic, mostly due to one poorly worded comment made by Google; however, the right answer in this case is very clear.
