The full form of SERP is Search Engine Results Page. It is nothing but the page displayed with all the relevant links when a user types a keyword through the various search engines i.e. Google, Bing or Yahoo, etc.
SERP is the second most talked about topic, whenever SEO comes to picture,. This is mainly because it allows you to see what and how websites are ranked for various keywords. This is a very good information to make your analysis on a given keyword and what’s more its available publicly. Website owners and SEO experts makes very good use of SERP to understand how the various search engine rank the websites for a particular keyword .
For Website owners writing similar content on a particular topic, SERP could help them to choose better keywords . They could compare their content with the various results and make an analysis on how to improve ranking on their content. Various tools are available in the market to help you check and track the various SERP results for a given keyword. If you find SEO and SERP analysis too tedious or you, you could always look for the customised tools that the various SEO experts provide. We will try to cover an extensive list of all the good SEO service providers and review them in our later posts.
Components of SERP
For Now, it is is mainly divided into three components:
1. The first is the textbox where the user types a keyword.
Two kinds of results are displayed, based on the keyword typed.
2. Organic/Natural website links: These are the website links that the search engine thinks is the most relevant to the audience. It ranks the most relevant one first and this is the link that is most clicked for the given keyword. Ideally the first three website links is mostly clicked by the users. Every website owner works really hard to be ranked in the first three for their content.
This does not mean that a website ranked 4th, 5th or 9th doesn’t gets clicked, but the ratio of clicks is relatively lower. The good think about the organic search result is that it is free of cost. The search engine doesn’t charge you anything to get listed on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd position. All you as a website owner is required to do is to provide great quality content with effective SEO.
3. Sponsored website links: These are the paid links that is displayed by the search engine when a user types a keyword. It is usually displayed at the top of the page after the search box and is tagged as ads/sponsored. What happens is that certain website owners pay the search engines to display their website link for a given keyword. So, it doesn’t matter how they are ranked organically, they will always be displayed at the top as sponsored ads.
The above particularly summarizes the concept of SERP. So, the next time you hear about it, don’t just freak out. Have a Happy Learning.