• by July 18, 2000

A recent study showing that Internet search success rates have increased as web users rely on multiple-keyword searches and the use of more than one search engine demonstrates the importance of "search engine positioning," or the ability to achieve high rankings on search engines worldwide, according to iProspect.com, the nation's leader in search engine positioning services.

A study of 33,000 Internet users picked at random during the first quarter of 2000 found that 81% of all Web searchers reported success finding the information they were looking for. NPD New Media Services, which conducted the survey on behalf of 13 major search engines, said it was the highest success rate for searches in two years. A major reason for the improved success of Web searches, according to NPD, is that a growing percentage of Internet searches are conducted using multiple keywords.

"These results indicate that Internet users are becoming more savvy in their search methods - and that's good news for Web sites that optimize their structure and text to capture the traffic from the major search engines," said Amanda G. Watlington, Ph.D., director of research at iProspect.com.

"More and more websites are using meta keyword tags, site description tags and title tags rich with their targeted keyword phrases, which help those sites attain higher rankings in search engines. Even recently, website administrators included useless text in these important meta tags that did not help their rankings in search engines. In the past, many websites had title tags that said things like 'home page' or 'welcome to company.com,' - terrific if they wanted a ranking on the words 'home' or 'page' or 'welcome.'"

In the NPD survey, nearly 45% of Web users searched using multiple keywords, a far more popular method among respondents than one keyword (28.6%), predefined options (17.9%) or questions (8.7%). The survey also found that Internet searchers by a wide margin prefer to use the same keywords on another search engine (76.9%) than to try different keywords on the same site (19%) if their initial search fails.

"The increasing popularity of multiple keywords and multiple search engines validate the strategy that iProspect.com employs for our clients," said Fredrick Marckini, CEO of iProspect.com. "By targeting all of the major search engines with a broad but tightly relevant universe of keyword phrases, our clients consistently rank in the top 30 search matches in search engine rankings."