Understanding Search Results SEO is all about getting search engines to show your website high up on a search engine results page , b...
Understanding Search Results
SEO is all about
getting search engines to show your website high up on a search
engine results page, better known as a SERP. You probably
perform several online searches every day, scanning the results for a website
that has the information you are looking for. But while we all see SERPs every
day, most of us don’t fully grasp which elements mean what. This article will
help you better understand a SERP so you can better understand SEO. Let’s do
this!
When a user types
in a search phrase (also known as a query), the search engine will provide him
with a list of results, designed to be as relevant as possible to the specific
query. This page of results is a SERP.
There's more than
meets the eye when it comes to SERPs. Let's look at a sample SERP and break it
down, then we'll teach you how to customize the way your own website appears in
search engine results.
The Anatomy of a SERP
Paid Results
As you read in the
previous article, the sites you see on the top and along the right side of the
results page are usually advertisements. It’s true — some of the best real
estate on the page is reserved for people willing to pay Google to display
their site. These are pay-per-click, or PPC, advertisements, meaning
businesses pay search engines for every person who clicks on their sponsored
links.
Organic Results
Below the paid
results, in the heart of the page, you will see the list of the top 10 organic
results. These are the websites that Google has determined are the most
relevant to the search terms you entered. If you want to see more results, you
can click on the right arrow at the bottom of the page. This will take you to
the next results page. If you had the patience, you could click through likely
thousands, or even millions, of results.
Local Results
If you searched for
a local business, Google will display an interactive map showing the location
of the top-ranked results for your query. You will also see a list of the
businesses that are displayed on the map. When you click on one of these
results, you’ll see the business’s location. You may also see a rating for each
of the local listings (from 0-5 stars), customer reviews and even information
about pricing. This data is taken from Google My Business, where anyone can set up a profile for
their own business.
SEO Titles and Descriptions
For each webpage
listed on the SERP, you’ll see the SEO page title and a brief description of
what the website is about. You can decide what to write for the title and
description of every page on your website, meaning you can choose how they show
up on a SERP.
The title and
description are brief texts that accurately summarize the content and focus on
each page on your website, ideally with a few keywords and phrases mixed in —
but more on keywords later! Your title can be up to about 60 characters
long and your description up to about 160 characters long.
Learn more about writing titles and descriptions here.
Now let’s get back to that SERP.
Tip:
Businesses that
have a profile and reviews in Google My Business are more likely to show up in
results. As a business owner, it’s definitely worthwhile to create a customized profile on Google.
Google Gets Smart
SERPs look
different depending on the specific search phrase you entered. Google’s goal is
to help searchers find the information they are looking for as quickly as
possible, and the SERP design can change to help facilitate this goal.
For example, if you type in “my flights” while signed into your Gmail calendar,
Google will immediately list any upcoming flights that it finds in your
calendar. Type in “Red Sox-Yankees” and you’ll see the score from their latest
match-up plus their face-offs. These kinds of results are called “rich
snippets” and they are a good example of how Google tries to understand
people's queries and provide them with immediate answers right on the
SERP.
The most common way
for your website to be included in a rich snippet is as part of the local
results outlined above. To appear in a rich snippet is popularly called
achieving a ‘zero ranking,’ meaning your website is even more visible than the
top ranking sites on a SERP. We’ll cover this process more extensively in
Chapter 4.
Now you know what
SEO is, why it matters and how search results appear on a SERP. Read on to learn how Google
determines which sites to show on a SERP — some of the most
valuable real estate on the Internet.
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