Knowing your demographics

In order to get the most bang for your SEO buck, you need to know the
demographics for your Web visitors. You need to know who’s looking for
you, because you’ll need to know where best to advertise. For example, if
you’re selling dog sweaters, it’s probably not a great idea to advertise in
biker bars. Sure, there might be a few Billy Bob Skullcrushers with a cute
little Chihuahua in need of a cashmere shrug, but statistically, your ad would
probably do much better in a beauty salon. The same goes for your Web
site in a search engine. Gender, age, and income are just a few of the metrics
that you’ll want to track in terms of identifying your audience. Search
engine users are pretty evenly split between male and female search engine
users, with a few slight differences: 50.2 percent of Yahoo! users are female,
whereas 53.6 percent of Google users are male. In terms of age brackets, the
older set leans more towards using Ask.com, and the younger users wind up
on Yahoo! and MSN.com most often. In fact, Ask.com is changing their focus
in order to cater specifically to married women. Google reaps the highest
number of users with an income of $100,000 a year or more. Search engines
even feed their results into other search engines, as you can in see our
handy-dandy Search Engine Relationship Chart later in this chapter.
Table 1-1 breaks down user demographics across the search engines for
your reference.

You need to know who your search engine visitors are because this demographic
data helps you effectively target your market. This demographic
distribution is often associated with search query keywords, the words that
search engine visitors use to search for your products. For an in-depth look
at choosing keywords, you can check out Book II, Chapter 2, but a brief summary
is that keywords are what a search engine looks for when figuring out
what sites to show in the SERP. Basically your keywords are the words you
used in your search query — or what you typed into the little search window.
If you are searching for something like information on customizing classic
cars, for example, you would type [custom classic cars] into the search field.
(When we discuss search queries through the book, we use square brackets
to show the keywords. You wouldn’t actually type the brackets into the
search field.) Figure 1-1 displays a typical search engine results page for the
query [custom classic cars].

The search engine goes to work combing its index for Web pages containing
these specific keywords and returns to you with your results. That way, if
you have a product that’s geared towards a certain age bracket, or towards
women more than men, you can tailor your keywords accordingly. It may
seem inconsequential, but trust me, this is important if you want to be
ranked well for targeted searches.