Studies have revealed that 90% of Internet users find websites through
search engines and out of those users, 90% do not go past the first 30
results displayed. With this in mind it is easy to see why it’s
important for your website to rank high in these results.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) are the pages you see after you
type in a search on Google or other search engines and click on the
Search button. Because 90% of people use search engines to find what
they are looking for these SERP’s are the most important pages on the
internet.
The Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s) can be broadly divided into
two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and Paid Advertisements
usually bought on a “Pay Per Click” (PPC) basis.Roughly 80% of clicks at Google occur within the organic listings
not the PPC listings. This is why is it important to get your site to
rank naturally in the search engine result pages.
Getting your site to
rank high is not tricky; it’s just a matter of optimising your website
to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the
process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the
search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines
are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with
little text your site will not rank high. You need to target each
keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search
terms “business plans” you need to have one page with the title
“business plans” and lots of text about “business plans”.
To me this is just common sense but then I have been working in the SEO
field for a number of years. However it never ceases to amaze me why
people still call their home pages “home” or have their business name on
the title of every single page of website. The owners probably search
for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google.
This is only good for the customers that know your company which is fine
for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you’re trying to get
customers from for internet users you need to optimise your text for the
search engines.
The other aspect of getting high SERPs is trust and authority. It is
kind of no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a
good reputation. Forgetting the cyber world for a moment, in the real
world established businesses have much more clout that new start up
businesses. Like your favourite restaurant. If a new restaurant opened
up just down the street you might not want to chance eating there and
stick with your favourite restaurant. Now if you hear that its gaining a
good reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out
yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust you get
is via an algorithm. The more links you get from already established
trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes
sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or not
relevant website.
Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines
terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and using
keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a naturally
progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything
else and their warning lights flash which means they might look into
your site and possibly penalise it.
So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to do everything the search
engines like. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so
users and the crawlers can find every page easily) ,have lots of good
relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your
website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you
shouldn’t go far wrong.
