SEO for Organic Search Results
Understanding SEO & Natural Free Search Listings
The purpose of the internet is to provide the most valuable and relevant information to those in search of it. So when you think about the function of a search engine such as Google, it is really trying to provide humans a list of the best information to match the search criteria entered into the search field.
Search engine optimization is a term becoming more popular among those businesses marketing products and services on the internet. Search engine optimization known in short as SEO is simply the process of making your website easy for the search engines (like Google) to scan and understand your content.
"Optimizing,” your website really means designing your web site to be search friendly in such a way that search engines can quickly find keywords within your page content, and determine whether it is a quality match of useful information/product/service for the search term or phrase being used. The more often your website is referenced as being a good match for a particular term or phrase, the more often and higher your site will appear in organic search results, on top of your competition.
Millions of people use search engines such as Google and Yahoo every day to find a particular product, service, or information. Some of these people might be potential clients looking for the type of business product or service you are selling. Multiple research studies indicate the majority of people only click on websites appearing at the top of search engine results, and in fact most people only view the first one to three websites at the top of the results list. And if they do not find what they are looking for, in the first few sites they click through, they will refine their search by typing in a new set of search terms. What this means for you as a business owner is if you are not at the top of search results, people who do not know your business are not going to find you and do business with you.
SEO Your Business to the Top of Search Results
There are two ways for your website to show up on the top of the results page when users are doing a search. The first way is to buy “paid advertising” listings (usually located at the very top of the page indicated by a different shade of background, or on the right hand side of the listings. The second way for your website to appear at the top of search engine results is “organic” or "natural” search results.
Obviously, the difference between the two is natural search results are free, and dependent on how relevant and credible your website is for particular search terms. Paid search, on the other hand occurs when businesses pay money to appear for popular search terms used to describe products or services they are selling.
Think of appearing in organic search results as similar to you being the feature story in your business industry's top magazine publication rather than paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for an ad placement in the same magazine. Of course, you want to appear at the top of search results free, verses paying money.
If you can rank high on the free (organic) search results for Google, it’s like getting tens of thousands of dollars worth of free advertising in the most relevant trade magazines for your industry, every time a new issue comes out.
While there is a little more involved with signing up for paid search you get the basic idea of how it works - you pay for preferred placement on search engines for popular terms used in search.
The big question becomes -- how does free or organic search work. Organic search is about relevance; and measuring how relevant your website (even more precisely one of your web pages) is in terms of matches the search phrase entered in the search engine.
How search engines determine the relevance of a website page in comparison to the given search term is a relatively complicated process. However, within all of the complexity there are some fundamentals used as criteria to assess a website’s credibility such as the title of the page, the words used within the content of the page, and the frequently in which these words occur. All of these factors added up together make a page more relevant in terms of creating a good match for a particular search term. And if you remember from earlier, the more often your website page is selected as a good match for a popular term, the more often and higher it appears in free organic search results. Briefly, this is the foundation for understanding search engine optimization – and SEO for natural search results. Learn more on how on going SEO services can improve your free organic search results. Thanks for reading! 