Importance of Search Engines in User Experience

2008 March 13
by Santosh Maharshi

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, follow me on Twitter & connect with me on LinkedIn Thanks for visiting!

Pure Visibility talks about how search engines contribute to the online user experience. Anybody who skims through search engines and referral logs has come across this:

What is also noteworthy is the large drop in other marketing channel efforts, such as referrals and direct traffic. Effectively visitors are relying on Google as their “bookmark” engine, often typing in a keyphrase that got them to the site in the past instead of trying to remember or spell the name of the company or service. This is a huge shift in user patterns. Note also that referral traffic dropped significantly.

These are also called ‘navigation search’ what this article refers to as ‘bookmark’ engine. It’s very hard for people to remember all the important domain names that they use or come across, so instead of bookmarking it in their browser or using social bookmarks they just go to search engines and search for it directly by using the brand name or a name close to domain name.

How you can improve over ‘keyword search’ instead of ‘navigation search’

  • Have a domain name which is very easy to remember or a natural domain name which exactly matches with your brand name. E.g. ICICIbank.com is easy and irctc.co.in is little hard to remember
  • Go for a .com domain first, people do not remember the domain extensions and this may mean redirection to others web site instead of yours
  • Navigational search cannot be avoided and majority of the referrals for you would be through Navigational Search Keywords. What you can do is that treat every section of your web site as the individual home page and work on optimizing that. By doing so, you will create multiple entry points through search engines and even though you will get refferals through navigation search, it won’t be the only referral.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share and Enjoy:
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • TwitThis

Related posts:

  1. What Is A successful Web User Interface / GUI ?
  2. Angle Theory Shortcuts – just amusing or really useful ?
  3. From web users to web curators & it’s importance for media
  4. Why my Mobile Bill is not user friendly
  5. India Elections 2009 Aggregator on MSN India powered by Live Search

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Note: You can use basic XHTML in your comments. Your email address will never be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS

Blog Widget by LinkWithin