What Is Search Engine Saturation?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

Search engine saturation is a term you don’t hear too many optimization folks talking about any more. But it’s a useful term and you need to know what it is. In a nutshell, it refers to the number of pages you have indexed in the search engines. Search engine saturation is your gauge for how effective you are in getting search engine listings. It’s one of the gauges for how effective you are at search engine marketing in general.

Let’s say you have a website with 100 pages. If 90 of those pages are indexed at Google, 75 are indexed at Yahoo!, 80 are indexed at MSN, and 65 at Ask.com, you’d say that your search engine saturation is a sum of those. That is, 310. You could include smaller search engines like Mahalo, Dogpile, and the several thousand others out there, but then counting pages would never end, so I just stick with the big 4.

It doesn’t matter that you have cross over on the indexing. If 65 of the pages indexed at Yahoo! are also indexed at Google, that doesn’t change your raw number. Your SES is a cumulative rating.

There are a number of ways to increase your search engine saturation. It isn’t just building pages to your website, although you can do that. Here are some other ways you can increase your search engine saturation:

• Start more websites – While search engine saturation is generally measured for each individual website, you are a business. If you start another website in the same niche as your first one then you stand a greater chance of increasing your exposure through search engine saturation simply because you double your chances that you’ll get page 1 rankings at Google.
• Start a blog – A blog is the best way to build search engine saturation. Each new blog post is counted as a separate web page.
• Build user-generated content - Let your users contribute. Wikipedia is one of the largest websites online simply because it allows others to contribute. You don’t think Jimmy Wales did it all, do you?
• Add an article directory to your site – Again, user-generated content. But this user-generated content can actually benefit you in other ways. By adding script to the articles in your database, you can also build link popularity every time someone uses an article from your directory.
• Incorporate social applications – Social bookmarking, social networking, video or audio file uploads, the list could go on. This goes back to user-generated content, but if you add social media to your site then you’ll be building more pages almost on auto-pilot.
• Start a forum – A forum is another form of social media. It’s also user-generated content. This is one of the best ways to build search engine saturation.

The possibilities are endless. The more pages you have on your website, the more chances you have of getting your pages listed in the search engines. Your search engine saturation goes up and so does your traffic.