Coming to the aid of the search party
Research by US web design expert Jakob Nielsen shows the snobbery of search. Internet users concentrate almost exclusively on the first two natural search results. After the top five, the rest may as well not be there.
"It's striking how little users read on the search engine results pages: just a few words read and bang, they click," Mr Nielsen says.
Mr Parfitt noticed the same thing empirically with Fast Impressions. "If you're in the top two spots, you're OK - but if you're beyond the top three you're pretty much stuffed, people won't bother with you at all." So he started looking for advice on boosting and maintaining his Google rank - and soon realised he was not alone. As companies increasingly crave search-engine visibility, a whole industry is growing up around serving their needs.
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