Search queries
Search queries are the keywords and search phrases that users enter in a search bar. These queries are processed by the search engine, which then displays the relevant results. So in a sense, search queries have more to do with ranking than anything else. Each webpage ranks uniquely against for a certain search query. pic
If you head over to Google Webmaster Tools, you can see the search queries that lead traffic to your site. You can view this information by expanding the Search Traffic section, and then clicking on Search Queries.
The search queries feature gives insights into the searches that have at least one page from your website shown in the search results. It collects these "impressions" together with the times when users visited your site - the "clicks" - and displays these for the last 90 days. You can also see the click-through rate, along with average position in search result pages.
It seems like the search query data has become much more refined. It used to be bucketed before, but Google seems to have worked on it to should more detail. Here's a comparison before and after the change.
before
after
You can do a lot with your search queries. One particular thing I like is the 'With Change' option. You normally see the 'Basic' option turned on. But if you were to click on the 'With Change' button, you'll be able to see a new column added for each that was there before, indicating the change in that value over time.
This lets you see how your pages have performed over time. If you click on Change next to any column, you can get to know what sort of content is trending, which tells you what should you cover. It also shows you negative change, which lets you see what's not working, and how you can improve/salvage it.
You can also sort your queries by highest CTR, impressions, clicks, and average position on SERPs. A high number of impressions and a low average position tells you that your content is doing fine turning up on SERPs. But its the CTR that actually let's you know whether searchers are actually falling for it. A High Impressions but a low CTR means your content might be SEO optimized, but isn't eye-catching. So you might work more on your meta descriptions, snippets, titles, permalinks, and so on.
I hope I've covered the basics of search queries. This is literally almost all there is to it. Simple, right? Well, if you figure out how to effectively utilize this data, the results can be really fruitful. Give us a mention in the comments below if you have any questions. We'd be glad to help :)
Explore More
Would you like to know which of your friends live in San Francisco? Are you curious about who likes Madonna? Or are you dying to know which friends appeared in photos with you before 2006? Facebook's new search tool will tell you, in the hopes that you'll spend more time on the world's largest online social network.
The search feature, called "Graph Search," is being rolled out slowly. For now, users can only search in English, and the service will be available only to a tiny fraction of Facebook's more than 1 billion users. As part of a group of reporters who attended Facebook's unveiling of the service on Tuesday, I was one of these users.
I got a chance to try out the feature and sift through my friends' interests, photos and other data. While most searches revealed little information about my friends that I didn't already know, it was nice to see it indexed and categorized in a way that wasn't possible before. There have been countless times I've wished I could group my friends by where they live, or find people who've worked at a particular company.
Google, too, has tried to incorporate social features in its powerful search engine, but it doesn't have the breadth of personal data that Facebook has amassed. Even so, Facebook isn't the best place to search for home flu remedies or movie show times. As such, I will continue to use Google to find crucial information such as Ryan Gosling's age or the year "The Hobbit" was published.
Facebook, meanwhile, should help unearth interesting details about my social network. It's through Facebook's search feature I that I was able to find a trove of adorable "photos of my friends before 1990," or see which of my friends are fans of the savvy Seattle sex columnist Dan Savage (12 of them, it turns out).
Searching for photos is one of the most personal and interesting features of the new tool. There are 19 photos of me and my husband taken by my friends that my friends like, for example. There are "fewer than 100" photos of my family before 2008, which is pretty good, considering I joined Facebook just a year earlier.
Rather than using keywords or various filters, Facebook's search tool aims to replicate the way people talk. It prompts users to "search for people, places and things'' and will try to complete your sentences. It should get better over time as more people outside of Facebook's labs use it.
Graph search doesn't dig through people's status updates, only the likes and interests that they have listed on Facebook. But that could come later, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted. The tool also searches photos - who's in them, who's liked them and who posted them. EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson predicts a "mass exodus" of untagging and unliking of photos and interests as Facebook rolls out the search feature more broadly and people realize that the things they liked five years ago are suddenly searchable by their friends and others, depending on their privacy settings.
To soothe privacy concerns that invariably arise with every new feature Facebook announces, Zuckerberg stressed that users will only be able to find information they have access to. This means no matter how many times you search for "photos of Mark Zuckerberg in diapers," you won't find one unless Mr. Z has shared his hypothetical baby photos with you in the first place.
The search tool could take more than a year to roll out to all of Facebook's billion-plus users, and it'll surely see a lot of changes in that time. A shortcoming I already noticed is that few of my friends are the oversharing type. With notable exceptions, many of them don't "like" restaurants, don't share their location or disclose whether they are a fan of Lady Gaga. Graph search is probably more fun - and more useful - for people whose friends share a lot.
For a better search experience, Facebook may have to nudge my friends to share more information about themselves and the photos they share. It won't be easy.
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