SEO Best Practices

1.4 Cyber Markets – Buyers and Sellers

A market is defined in Wikipedia as "any one of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures where by people trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy. It is an arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to exchange things. Markets vary in size, range, geographic scale, location, types and variety of human communities, as well as the types of goods and services traded."

By that definition, each search phrase is a cyber market with clearly defined sellers (matching results) and buyers (keyword search volume) located as a result set by any given Search Engine. Changing the phrase slightly alters the market as in the case of the singular versus the plural form of a word.

Figure 1: Based on the Cornell Eye Tracking Study Percentage of Clicks

As in any market, such as a farmer's market or a Mall, stores closest to entry points tend to fare better than stores deep in the bowels of the market place. With Search Engine results, the clicks increase exponentially the closer they rank toward the top. 79% of the traffic goes to the first three results, with the listing in the first position taking an overwhelming lion's share.