With over 50 Billion searches each year in the U.S. alone, Search Engine Marketing is easily the 1,000 lb Gorilla online, far out-pacing any other form of Internet Marketing.
Now that over 80% of Americans have Internet access (either at home or at work) recent research clearly shows that the Internet has become a primary source of information for those seeking to purchase products or services. With so much to gain (or lose), it makes sense to fully understand how search engines work with a view toward tapping into this phenomenal form of marketing to drive brand awareness, customers and of course, revenue.
For the purpose of this discussion, we will focus on "Natural" or free listings; we'll be discussing Pay Per Click marketing in another post. Refer to the following graphic to better understand the various components of a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Unlike Pay Per Click listings where advertisers pay for placement, "Natural" or "Organic" listings are based entirely upon relevancy. The websites shown on page one of a SERP are considered by Google to be the most relevant sites for the keyword or keyphrase typed in by the user. To make the most of Search Engine Marketing we need to understand how Google (and other search engines) determine relevance.
It's All About Relevance
There are literally dozens of criteria search engines use to determine relevance. Key indicators are page titles, domain names, keyword density and the number of links pointing to a website just to name a few.
With millions of websites and billions of webpages on the Internet today it's simply not possible for search engine companies to use people-power to review pages and determine their relevancy. Therefore, they automate the process by using intelligence software to "crawl" your website and collect information which is then used by a ranking algorithm to deteremine relevance.
This is an important distinction to make. Since the entire process is driven by software, you won't get points for having a "pretty" website. Search engines don't have a preference for attractive websites, they don't really care that you have great navigation and superb animation. They care only about gathering cold, hard data to determine what your site is about and how it stacks up against other sites on the same topic.
If you think about it, it makes sense. The goal of search engines is to return the best possible results based on the search term the user types in. This is exactly why Google dominates online.. They do it better than everyone else. Continued in Search Engine Primer - Part 2