the importance of high ranking

Analysis into how users retrieve information from the web, has shown that people rarely go beyond the top 30 results listed from a search. In fact, the top 30 results get over 90% of search traffic and the top 10 results receive nearly 80% more traffic than those in positions 11-30 achieve.

Research also shows that web users typically visited only the first three results from a query, with one in five searchers spending 60 seconds or less on a linked web document.

This clearly demonstrates that to generate traffic to your website, it needs to be visible when web users are searching for your type of product or service.

A number of research organisations track the volume of traffic on the web, either specifically on search engines, or on the largest web sites (which tends to include the main portals and search engines).

• Yahoo's list of Internet Statistics and Demographics entries, those related to the world wide-web and Internet Surveys.
• EMAP's Marketing hot list contains links to resources in quite a few categories.
• Open Market's Internet Index "The Internet Index is an occasional collection of facts and statistics about the Internet and related activities. The Index is edited by Win Treese."
• WWW Demographics by Rubicon.

A useful summary of these surveys and an analysis of their results can be found on Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch.

Do you know how your site is performing? We can provide a FREE web position performance report giving your ranking on each of the major search engines for your chosen keywords. Click here to request the report.

Research shows that the most popular search engines in the UK today are:

Wanadoo :: [website]