MI4007 Business Information Management PDF

Business Information Management Dr. Michael P. O’Brien Module: MI4007 1 What is a Search Engine? An internet-based tool that searches an index of documents for a particular term, phrase or text specified by the user....

Business Information Management Dr. Michael P. O’Brien Module: MI4007 1 What is a Search Engine? An internet-based tool that searches an index of documents for a particular term, phrase or text specified by the user. Commonly used to refer to large web- based search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet. Different than a Directory Common Characteristics: – Spider, Indexer, Database, Algorithm – Find matching documents and display them according to relevance – Frequent updates to documents searched and ranking algorithm – Strive to produce “better”, more relevant results than competitors 2  Search Engine Examples 3 Why Search Engine Marketing? Over 85% of all traffic on the internet is referred from a search engine 90% of all users don’t look past the first 30 results (most only view top 10) Many websites aren’t even indexed, most are poorly optimised and get very little traffic from the search engines Cost-effective advertising Clear and measurable ROI 4  Search Engine Market Share As of 2024, Google processes over 99,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 8.5 billion searches per day and 3.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Approximately 4.91 billion people globally use Google. 5 Some Further Statistics The number of people using Internet search engines is increasing year on year and is almost unfathomable. To put it into perspective, there are well in excess of 500 million tweets per day, so 500 million x 13. No. of daily searches per day per search engine: – Google: 8,500,000,000 – Bing: 900,432,000 – Baidu: 583,520,803 – Yahoo: 536,101,505 – Other: 128,427,264 6  Google: Curious Facts In 1999, it took Google one month to crawl and build an index of about 50 million pages. In 2012, the same task was accomplished in less than one minute! 19% to 24% of queries that get asked every day have never been asked before! Every query has to travel on average 1,500 miles to a data center and back to return the answer to the user. A single Google query uses 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds to retrieve an answer. There are more searches taking place on mobile devices than on computers (Google). Approximately 30% of mobile queries are voice searches. Google Guide: http://www.googleguide.com/ 7 A Search Engine’s Goal Accumulate large index (database) of web documents to search Provide highly-relevant and high-quality results to users (better than competitors) Generate revenue via paid advertising and related business ventures that typically leverage large amount of traffic 8  Anatomy of a Search Engine 9 How do Search Engines Work? Search engines compile their databases by employing "spiders" or "robots" ("bots") to crawl through web space from link to link, identifying and perusing pages. Sites with no links to other pages may be missed by spiders altogether. Spiders will ignore sites that explicitly state not be indexed by the search engines. Once the spiders get to a web site, they typically index most of the words on the publicly available pages at the site. Web page owners may submit their URLs to search engines for "crawling" and eventual inclusion in their databases. Whenever you search the web using a search engine, you're asking the engine to scan its index of sites and match your keywords and phrases with those in the texts of documents within the engine's database. 10  How do Search Engines Work? 11 How do Search Engines Work? It is important to remember that when you are using a search engine, you are NOT searching the entire web as it exists at this moment. You are actually searching a portion of the web, captured in a fixed index created at an earlier date. How much earlier? It's hard to say… Spiders regularly return to the web pages they index to look for changes. When changes occur, the index is updated to reflect the new information. However, the process of updating can take a while, depending upon how often the spiders make their rounds and then, how promptly the information they gather is added to the index. Until a page has been both "spidered" AND "indexed," you won't be able to access the new information. Video: https://youtu.be/LVV_93mBfSU 12  Ranking Web Pages In ranking web pages, search engines follow a certain set of rules. These may vary from one engine to another. Their goal, of course, is to return the most relevant pages at the top of their lists. To do this, they look for the location and frequency of keywords and phrases in the web page document and, sometimes, in the HTML META tags. They check out the title field and scan the headers and text near the top of the document. Some of them assess popularity by the number of links that are pointing to sites; the more links, the greater the popularity, i.e., value of the page. 13 What a Search Engine Sees View > Source (HTML code) https://totheweb.com/learning_center/tools-search-engine- simulator/ (HTML text, no images and little formatting) 14  So What is the Algorithm? Top Secret! Only select employees of the actual search engines know for certain. Reverse engineering, research and experiments gives SEOs (search engine optimization professionals) a “pretty good” idea of major factors and approximate weight assignments. Constantly changing, tweaking, updating is done to the algorithm. Websites and documents being searched are also constantly changing. Varies by Search Engine – some give more weight to on-page factors, some to link popularity Substantial differences also on searching, retrieval display. – International Directory of Search Engines: https://www.searchenginecolossus.com – Search Engine Watch: https://searchenginewatch.com 15 Digital Marketing Digital Marketing is the process of building and maintaining customer relationships through online activities to generate sales and/or capture customers that are searching on the Internet for answers. Getting found online! With the constant growth of the web, and more people getting connected every day digital marketing has become a necessity for many organisations. This also includes small businesses that want to trade online and make a name for themselves on the web. The web is crowded with information. If you have a website, how can these people reach you? 16  Components of Digital Marketing Website design (user experience) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Pay per click (PPC) Social media marketing (SMM) E-mail marketing Display advertising (banner ads) 17 Search Engine Optimisation Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results - often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results. All major search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing) have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the algorithms which dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimising a website may involve editing its content, HTML, and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines 18  Search Engine Optimisation 19 Pay Per Click Pay per click (PPC) is a type of sponsored online advertising that is used on a wide range of websites, including search engines, where the advertiser only pays if a web user clicks on their ad. Hence the title, 'pay per click'. Advertisers place bids on keywords or phrases that they think their target audience would type in a search field when they are looking for specific goods or services. GoogleAds is the leader (ads.google.com) Advantages include: Get targeted visitors within hours (sometimes minutes), can yield highly profitable results, can be highly targeted. Disadvantages include: you have to pay regardless of any sales, Competitive keywords demand higher bids, restricted to text and image ads, traffic stops when you stop paying. 20  Pay Per Click 21 Tips & Optimisation Techniques Research keywords related to your business Identify competitors, utilise benchmarking techniques and identify level of competition Utilise descriptive title tags for each page Ensure that your text is HTML-text and not image text Use text links when ever possible Use appropriate keywords in your content and internal hyperlinks (don’t overdo!) Obtain inbound links from related websites Monitor your search engine rankings and more importantly your website traffic statistics and sales/leads produced Educate yourself about search engine marketing 22  Evolution of Digital Marketing 23 Digital Marketing Measurement Many tools and systems are available to calculate your ROI and to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign. ROI Tools ü Google Analytics (GA) ü Google Webmasters’ Tools ü Basic google search ü Google Ads ü Social media monitoring tools 24 25