Search has become integrated into the fabric of our society. With more than 12 billion searches being performed each month as of January 2009 (according to comScore), approximately 400 million web searches are performed every day. This means that on average more than 4,500 searches are performed every single second of every day.
As Google owns approximately 65% of the search market share, Google’s search technology handles more than 2,900 searches per second. In addition, users have grown to expect that the responses to their search queries will be returned in less than one second.
Now people can obtain information in mere seconds—information that 20 years ago would have required a trip to the library, a search through the Dewey Decimal System, and a foot search through halls of printed volumes, a process that could easily have consumed two hours or more. Through the new channel of search, people can also conduct much of their shopping, banking, and social transactions online—something that has changed the way our global population lives and interacts.
This dramatic shift in behavior represents what investors like to label a disruptive event—an event that has changed something in a fundamental way. Search engines are at the center of this disruptive event, and having a business’s website rank well in the search engines when people are looking for the service, product, or resource it provides is critical to the survival of that business. However, like most paths to success, obtaining such prime search result real estate is not a simple matter, but it is one that this book aims to deconstruct and demystify as we examine, explain, and explore the ever-changing art of search engine optimization (SEO).
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