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Knowing what people search for on the internet is worth a fortune! But what are the most common search terms? There are ways to research which words are used in search engines. Here's how to find out what people search for on the internet.

Search Engine Optimization is crucial. If you're trying to build your business on the Internet, "What People Are Looking For" becomes everything. Your business needs to come up in search results. But that's no good if nobody searches for the words that find you! So if you want to know how to get seen on the internet, then you need to find out what people are searching for - and tailor your site to those words. That's what Search Engine Optimization means.

I did a bit of scuttling around to see if my vague guesses were right. I wasn't even close! If we take one of the biggest search engines, Google, they have their own listings of what's hot right now. Surprisingly, people are mainly searching for people, and in all likelihood this list changes constantly according to who's in the current news. The top ten things entered into their engine right now are as follows: Shawn King, Philosopher Keirkegaard, Bob Nardelli, CPSC, Roy Simmons, Shawn Southwick, Larry King's Wife, Partygoingon.com, Margaret Whitton, and Bugatti Veryon.

More than likely when someone enters a web address, it's by accident and they meant to type it into the address bar directly. But still, it's quite surprising that the list above is mainly centered around people. Unless we're making a celebrity news site, these aren't much use to us.

A research mob have done their own investigation and used Google's tools to get data on which of the "general" terms came up most often. This list is more what I'd have expected. There are plenty of sites who have various lists and data on what people are searching for: they are all biased by trends of the day and what kind of users visit those particular search engines (beginners, children, older people, workers, programmers - they all search for different types of things). In that respect, this list here below of "general" search terms is likely to be much more useful, and it's far more useful to most businesspeople when trying to evaluate what kinds of terms attract customers.

Top of the groups most searched were terms related to news and weather. And next in line was Games. Moving through the list the next most common searches were electronics brands such as HP, Nokia, Sony and Dell. Close on their heels were the various web programming terms pooled together: XML, HTML, Java and others. Images was also a huge search. It's hard to tell if that one's related to web work or something else, of course!

The next contender was a combination of love and girls. With the proliferation of dating sites these days it's hardly surprising. Nor is the fact that music came in next, and on a more serious note, jobs.

At this point was a big group of internet-only companies. Yahoo, Google, eBay and Amazon all jumped in here. It's a little bit surprising that someone would search for Yahoo inside Google, isn't it?

Finally came the last big search - Microsoft. I suppose we should expect this one.

A word of warning: Google, and other good search engines, will filter sites from their search results, that contain completely unrelated words. So you probably won't help your Electronics online store by plastering it full of words like love, girls, jobs and yahoo. So use the knowledge wisely and use search result rankings to get your site noticed in the smart way.

Reference:
Allbutt the Best
Google

Learn more about this author, Eliza Sininen.
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