What is 'SEO'?

 

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

 

What are 'Natural Search Results'?

A Natural language search engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web using techniques of Natural language processing, such as question answering. Natural language search is a major goal in the development of the semantic web.

A natural language search engine would in theory find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form 'which U.S. state has the highest income tax?', conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords 'state, income and tax'. Natural language search, on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that contains the answer to the question. If it works, results would have a higher relevance than results from a keyword search engine.

 

What are 'Organic Search Results'?

Organic search results are listings in search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements.

The Google, Yahoo!, and Live search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the adverts are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background colour and/or placement on the page. Further, the appearance of the adverts on all major search engines is so similar to the genuine search results that a large majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between them.

Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew) realised that many of the highest placed 'results' on search engine results pages were actually adverts, it became important within the search engine optimization industry to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that all the results were in fact 'results', the qualifier 'organic' was invented to distinguish the real search results from the adverts. Because the distinction is important (and the word 'organic' has many useful metaphorical uses) the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimisation and web marketing industry.

Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than adverts, which has led them to rebutt the research cited above. The same report (and others going back to 1997) by Pew shows that users avoid clicking 'results' that they know to be adverts.

Achieving high organic search listings is a primary strategy of search engine optimization.

 

Why is a high placement in search engines beneficial?

Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site.