source from “Business Week”, posted by The Marketing Ninja on October 26, 2009

Search engine optimization techniques/beliefs have been debated for many years, since SEO’s conception, though a new topic has been bothering me for quite a few weeks now.

When viewing website results in search engines, let’s say Google for this example, visitors put more strength in websites that a) appear on the first page and b) appear towards the top of the page. This relates back to Pavlov’s salivating dog experiment — search engine algorithms have trained us to react in this manner. Websites that are more reliable, relevant and popular rank higher in search engines and over time we have become accustomed to looking at the the first page of search engine result pages (SERPS).

As one scans through results (from top to bottom) importance, reliability, relevancy and other factors exponentially decrease. Simply said, the listings on the top of the page have more “strength” in the eyes of humans compared to results that appear towards the bottom of the page. After scanning through irrelevant listings on top, interest/retention diminishes and users will either enter a new search query or go to the second page.

Now, this is where the fun comes in… Is it better to have a website appear on the bottom of the first page or on the top of the second page?

Personally, I believe search engine users feel a re-birth, or enlightenment, when clicking to the second page and seeing fresh, new results. This leads me to believe that positioning a website on the top of the second page for competitive keywords may be more beneficial than being on the very bottom of the first page.

I will be researching this topic more in-depth and will share my thoughts when I come to a final conclusion.

Sincerely,

Aaron Schoenberger

The Brainchild Group

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