the art of seo(chapter one)

preface:
Andy Johns (@ibringtraffic)：growth strategist@Wealthfront

***1.Search Reflecting Consciousness and Connecting Commerce***
*The Human Goals of Searching*
One of the most important elements to building an SEO strategy for a website is developing a thorough understanding of the psychology of your target audience, and how they use words and concepts to obtain information about the services and/or products you provide.

an example of search engine usage consists of the following steps:
1. Users experience the need for information:
navigational query
transactional query
informational query
2. Users formulate that need using a string of words and phrases.
3. Users execute the query, check the results, and if they seek additional information, will try a refined query.

*Determining Searcher Intent: A Challenge for Search Marketers and Search Engines*
search intent(not search keywords) can be divided to 3 part:
1.navigational query:
Users perform navigational searches with the intent of going directly to a specific website.(Opportunities: Pull searcher away from destination)
2.Informational Queries
3.Transactional Queries:
Transactional searches don’t necessarily have to involve a credit card or immediate financial transaction. Creating a Pinterest account, signing up for a free trial account at DomainTools, or finding the best local Japanese restaurant for dinner tonight are all transactional queries. (Opportunities: Achieve transaction;Average traffic value: Very high).

percentage of search intent:
Research from Pennsylvania State University and the Queensland University of Technology shows that more than 80% of searches are informational in nature, and only about 10% of searches are navigational or transactional.

classify queries:
The researchers went further and developed an algorithm to automatically classify searches by query type. When they tested the algorithm, they found that it was able to correctly classify queries 74% of the time. The difficulty in classifying the remaining queries was vague user intent—that is, the queries could have multiple meanings.

*Searcher Intent*
When you are building keyword research charts for clients or on your own sites, it can be incredibly valuable to determine the intent of each of your primary keywords.

*How People Search*
In this sequence, the user performs five searches over a 55+ minute period before making a final selection. The user is clearly trying to solve a problem and works at it in a persistent fashion until the task is done.(the ture intent may not be literal meaning or unique.we must find the fundalmental intent of user search)(people frequently begin with a general term and gradually get more specific as they get closer to their goal.)