Essential to SEO – Users’ Search Habits

Last week we wrote an article Online Privacy Threat caused by AOL’s release of search information on 650,000 of its users. Let’s see some of the interesting statistics Lee Gomes wrote about for The Wall Street Journal Online. The most common word used in the searches was “free” followed by “new”. Not including proper nouns, the next most used words where "lyrics," "county," "school," "city," "home," "state," "pictures," "music," "sale," "beach," "high," "map," "center" and "sex". The 17th most popular search term was “Google” In Gomes’s research, 14% of all users conducted searches for explicit sexual search terms. There where 50,549 searches for nude pictures. Surprisingly “Pamela Anderson” was only second on the list. She was booted out of her long-standing first place by “Peter Wentz” of the group Fall Out Boy. What is interesting is that 47% of these nude celebrity searches did not result in a click. It seems not all users are finding precise results first time round with 28% of all searches being refinements of earlier searches. Good news for companies’ spending money on Search Engine Optimisation strategies. The quest for 1st place rankings in AOL is well worth the effort. 42% of clicks made, were made on the first result, and it’s likely that this statistic applies to the other major search engines too. Gomes found that 413,638 searches were questions. With these searches only around 35% of users clicked on any of the results. When doing searches for URLs, 15% of users include the full domain name, including “http” and “.com”. Some other interesting searches include 3,938 searches for “Britney Spears” but only 3.279 for “God”. 1,881 searches for “Madonna” and only 165 for “Mother Teresa”. There were no searches for any modern writers. View Lee Gomes’s original article on The Wall Street Journal Online or join our Search Engine Discussion Forum to discuss search habits and other factors that affect Search Engine Optimisation.