Personal Site SERP comparison
I tend to find that MSN gives me the most relevant results. Searching for "Charleston web site design" on MSN shows that my site is currently #4. On Yahoo, the same search puts me at #56, and finally Google puts me somewhere after #80. I stopped looking for my site after the 3rd of 4th page of Google's results.
MSN seems to go by semantic markup, headers match page titles, etc, and actual content. Yahoo and Google, seem to go by link count? I've only had my site up for about a month, so it's really too soon to tell. These assumptions are purely a guess. I have a lot of work to do on my personal site's SEO, so a month or so from now will allow for more realsitic testing.
MSN seems to have rewarded me for my clean markup, while others have not...yet at least. It's a work in progress, as always, and I am still studying the top three Search Engine giants to see what works and what doesn't. Here is what I found while researching my current page ranks on MSN, Yahoo, and Google SERPs.
Search Terms and Rank as of 11/26/05:
Search Term(s):
"charleston web site design"
Rank:
msn #4
yahoo #56
google #80+ (stopped looking on SERP 3)
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Search Term(s):
"charleston search engine optimization"
Rank:
msn #3
yahoo #48
google #140+ (stopped looking on SERP 3)
--
Search Term(s):
"charleston custom illustration"
Rank:
msn #1
yahoo #2
google #1
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Search Term(s):
"charleston logo design"
Rank:
msn #4
yahoo #21
google #70+ (stopped looking on SERP 1)
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Search Term(s):
"charleston flash animation"
Rank:
msn #1
yahoo #12
google #300+ (stopped looking on SERP 5)
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Search Term(s):
"charleston ad banners"
Rank:
msn #5
yahoo #9
google #210+ (stopped looking on SERP 3)
--
Search Term(s):
"charleston photo restoration"
Rank:
msn #1
yahoo #27
google #240+ (stopped looking on SERP 4v)
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Conclusion:
Someone looking for Web site design related services in the Charleston, SC area would be better served by MSN, then Yahoo, then Google.
In the process, I also noted the placement of the local competition for the services searched for above, and the results were very similar. Google returned the most non-relevant results out of the three SEs tested
Results for "charleston flash animation" were perhaps the most shocking.
As I optimize, and retest, I am writing a detailed summary, that will be posted on the (soon to be released) "Odds n' Ends" section of my Web site.
I though you folks might find these early results interesting.
Replies
Re: Personal Site SERP comparison
I would assume that your site would do better on the Yahoo and Google Local Searches:
http://local.yahoo.com/
http://local.google.com/
There you can focus more on the location of the business.
MSN results
Its true that MSN is most responseive to on page optimization. But that makes it easy to fool the search engine as well. Just by adding some dummy content, any ameatuer site can rank above a serious site. The only reason why this has not been abused much is that MSN doesnt provide a large number of visitors anyways.
You may be ranked low in Google, but I am sure google will still be bringing in more visitors than MSN.
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