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Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

Let’s do an experiment to see if the search engines can read my mind.

Let’s type in a single word search in Google.

search-for-gas.jpg

Let’s take a look at some of the first few search results:

gas-results.jpg

Google thinks I’m searching for the company with the symbol GAS and shows me a chart of the stock performance. Wikipedia gets the first two listings. Then it’s GasBuddy followed by Southern Cal Gas.

The next listing is an interesting one…

gas-results2.jpg

Wow! Did you know that? You produce 1-4 pints of gas per day and pass gas on average 14 times.

It seems that the Adwords advertisers are capitalizing on this. See the top few results showing up:

gas-adw-1.jpg

gas-adw-2.jpg

Let’s try the same search in MSN.

Apparently, MSN thinks we’re only searching for gas as in petroleum and not the kind you get when you eat too many beans.

msn-gas.jpg

Most of the sponsored listings on MSN are also targeted towards gas credit cards, gas prices, and such. It’s totally different from the advertisers showing up on Google.

And what about Yahoo?

yahoo-gas1.jpg

I learned something new. I didn’t know that there’s such a thing as Gas Gas motorcycles or GAS jeans. I know about Guess jeans but not GAS jeans.

You learn something new every day!

Yahoo’s sponsored results are the most diverse, ranging from stock market recommendations, colon cleansers to gas cards.

As a search engine marketer, you can learn a lot by studying both the natural listings and the types of ads that appear for your selected search term. Sometimes you’ll also get some comic relief.

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