Search optimization focuses on how people search; its foundation stone is quality Web content. Search engine optimization focuses on how search engines work.

In an age of information overload, how is your Web site going to be discovered? Because if it's not found, it might as well not exist... and all your effort will have been in vain.

Every day, millions of people use search engines to find things. A significant majority of these people will not go beyond the first page of search results, and most people will stop searching by the third page.

However, if you want to succeed with search engines in the long term, you should not primarily focus on how the search engine works. Rather, you should focus on how the brain of the searcher works. Because if you understand how people search, you're halfway there to getting found when they search for your content.

It all comes down to a small set of words. (I call these words "carewords"—the words people really care about.)

Searchers are the modern equivalent of hunter-gatherers. They go out hunting and gathering content in order to complete a task. It's very important to understand that searching is just the first step in this task completion.

Making sure your content is found in the first page of search results is a great start, but it is only a start. Until the searchers have completed the task they came to your Web site to complete, nothing of substance has been achieved.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Gerry McGovern
Gerry McGovern (gerry@gerrymcgovern.com) is a content management consultant and author. His latest book is The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online, which teaches unique techniques for identifying and measuring the performance of customers' top tasks.