Welcome to the first in our Search 101 series. These articles will provide introductions to topics in search marketing, starting with understanding how the search engines work and moving on to the opportunities they present business owners and how to manage different types of campaign.
Search 101 Topic One: An Overview of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) Part One
Over time the types of results that search engines display have increased with the development of new products and technologies. Today search engine results pages are built up from a range of sources. This article will discuss these sources, how to identify them and the opportunities they can present.
Understanding Search Results (SERPS)
There is one type of search engine result that will be displayed for all searches (unless there are no results at all): natural search results, also know as organic search results.
Natural Search Results
Natural search results are the core of a search engine. These results are built up by the search engines running pieces of software referred to as “crawlers” (or “spiders”, or “robots”) which visit websites, follow links between pages, and add new pages into the search engines database of web pages, referred to as the index. These are then analysed by pieces of software called algorithms, which determine which websites appear for which searches.
We’ll be reviewing exactly how natural search results are generated in another article; it’s important to understand for the purposes of this one that the content of web pages, the way they are coded and the sites that link to them are some of the factors that determine what searches a website is listed in natural search results for, and how highly it is listed. The process of editing a website to achieve a high listing in natural search results is known as search engine optimisation (SEO).
Natural search results appear on a white background at the major search engines, to the left of the screen, as shown on figure 1 below.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Results
PPC, also known as paid search or pay for placement (PFP) are adverts that are triggered by the words the searcher has typed in. These adverts appear above and to the right of the natural search results, and will not appear if no advertiser has chosen to appear for a word or if the engines do not allow for advertising on that word (for example gambling words in some countries).
PPC adverts are normally shown underneath the heading “Sponsored Links” or similar on a different colour background (blue in figure 1 showing Google results). Advertisers pay only when their linked is clicked upon, hence the name pay per click.
These clicks can be tracked from a visitor entering a website through to sale, allowing for the optimisation of advert text, keywords, web pages and shopping cart process to improve sales; therefore PPC advertising (and much of search engine marketing) is referred to as performance-led advertising.
Figure 1: Results on Google for “cameras”.
Part Two of this article will be published shortly.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Duncan Parry helps UK companies meet their objectives for their websites using pay per click advertising and search engine optimization to increase visitor numbers and sales levels. He has previously worked for the search engines Espotting (now Miva) and Lycos in the UK.
Duncan Parry began working in search at the end of 1999 when he joined Lycos UK to work on the Link project, a new directory of UK websites. As a directory editor he researched, categorized and wrote short descriptions of hundreds of UK-specific websites in categories including genealogy, finance and business before taking responsibility for three of the fastest growing categories - computing, telecommunications and the Internet. Results from the directory feed into Lycos search results.
In November 2001 he left Lycos to join pay per click search engine Espotting at the beginning of a time of remarkable growth for the company and the search industry as a whole. Espotting won deals to power the advertising on the search results in Europe of Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and many ISPs and destination sites.
Whilst at Espotting Duncan rose to Agency Editorial Manager, responsible for an Editorial team that managed the UK search advertising across Espotting’s network of the clients of major advertising agencies. He also personally managed the UK campaigns of famous-name ecommerce websites and consistently improved advertiser spend and performance. He also worked with management to develop internal systems and business processes as the company rapidly expanded across Europe from 50 employees to over 180 and then merged with US-based FindWhat.com.
Duncan left Espotting in February 2004 to act as a search marketing consultant for companies including VNU Business Publications, a network of IT, business and finance titles in the UK.
In February 2005 he setup Steak Media
All of Duncan's articles represent his own opinion and not those of his employers, present or past.
