SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

Part I. Getting Started with SEO

Chapter 2. Search Results, Deconstructed

In This Chapter

Deciphering the construction of the search-results page

Discovering organic and PPC results

Understanding the importance of Local

Finding out about shopping, video, images, movies, recipes, and more

Before I jump into the nitty-gritty of how to get your site ranked high in the search engines, you should look at what the term search results really means. All too often, people think of search results as a single thing, whereas, in fact, it’s a combination of different things, and until you understand what those different things really are, you can’t see the entire picture.

Different search terms will produce different search results. The results will always include information from the organic index, but whether or not results are included from the Local index, the Shopping index, the PPC index, and so on depends on the type of search made. Search forpizza, for instance, and you’ll find information from the Local index, search for first indian war of independence and you won’t. The search engines are trying to provide you with the best results, so they analyze the search terms to figure out what you’re likely to be looking for. Are you looking for a local business? News? A video or image, perhaps?

The search engine results pages (SERPs) produced by major search engines seem to get more complicated year by year, and it’s worth understanding where the information on the results pages actually comes from, which is what I look at in this chapter.

The Big Two: Organic and PPC

Search results are mostly dominated by two particular indexes: the organic or natural search results, and the PPC (Pay Per Click) search results. Take a look at Figure 2-1; I’ve marked the two areas.

Figure 2-1: The primary search results are from the organic and PPC indexes.

The organic-results index is created by searchbots. For instance, Google uses something called a googlebot to retrieve pages. It’s common to talk about searchbots as if somehow they wander around the Web, moving from page to page through links between the pages, collecting the pages, and reading them. Of course what’s really going on is that bots are programs, running on the search engine’s servers, that send requests to Web servers asking for pages — just as your browser does when you click a link. When they receive the page, they read it, and then request the pages that the retrieved page links to.

By the way, the search results typically put ten results from the organic index into the search-results page, though, as you see later in this chapter, those results are often interspersed with other types of search results. (In some cases, in particular when adding local results to the page, the search engines may display a smaller number of organic-search results, perhaps seven or eight.)

The other major form of search result is the PPC (Pay Per Click) ad. Most search results today, including results from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, include PPC ads, ads that cost the advertiser nothing until someone clicks the ad, at which point the advertiser is charged a click fee (thus, “pay per click”).

PPC ads are typically placed at the top of the search results (three or four results, sometimes five in Yahoo!, though some searches result in no ads) and in a column to the right of the main search results.

There are two important categories of PPC ads:

· Simple text ads

· “Shopping” or “product listing” ads that often contain images

Figure 2-1, for instance, shows several ads at the top with the images; these ads are from the Google Product Listings Ads index, while the other ads are from the Google AdWords index, which contains text ads.

It’s sometimes unclear where the PPC ads end and the organic results begin — the three major search engines put a colored background under the ads at the top and a label that says Ads or Sponsored Results, but on many screens, the color is sometimes not, and the label is often missed among the general page clutter. Thus many users don’t realize the distinction between organic results and PPC ads.

On the other hand, among people who do understand the distinction, there are various schools of thought: Some users never click the ads, some always click the ads and ignore the organic results, while others realize that the ads provide really good results for some searches and not-so-good results for others.

When people talk about search engine optimization, they’re typically talking about the organic search results. When you optimize pages, for instance (see Chapters 3, 7, and 9), you’re typically doing so in order to rank well in the organic index. In this book, though, I discuss other indexes, in particular the Local and Shopping indexes (see the next two sections). As for the simple text-based PPC ads, that subject isn’t covered in this book.

Looking at Local Results

There’s another type of search result that is incredibly important, with a huge presence in many search-results pages: Local results. Search Yahoo!, for instance, for the term personal injury attorney, and you may see something like Figure 2-2. These Local results can take up a lot of space, in particular in Google and Yahoo!, and often appear above organic search results (though below PPC ads) and thus are an important consideration for businesses that serve a particular geographic area. I look at this subject in Chapter 12.

Figure 2-2: Local results can often take up a significant part of the search-results page (here shown in Yahoo!).

Checking Out Shopping Results

It’s often not hard for the search engines to figure out when someone is quite likely searching for a product he may be interested in buying. If someone searches for shoes, it’s quite likely he’s interested in buying a pair, either offline (that’s where the Local results come in) or online (that’s where the Shopping results come in). On the other hand, if someone searches on shoe manufacturing victorian england, it’s unlikely that he’s in the market for a pair.

The major search engines all maintain product indexes, totally separate from the organic or even the regular text-based PPC indexes. However, product results are typically a form of PPC advertising; you submit your products to the search engines’ product listings, and get charged if anyone clicks on your listing in the search results. (Chapter 15 explains how to get your products into those indexes.)

When a search engine figures a searcher may be looking for product information, it inserts product results — typically with images — into the search-results page, as shown previously in Figure 2-1. Clicking the Shopping search results leads into the search engine’s shopping area, where the searcher can find more information about these, and other, products.

Staying Current with News Results

Another significant search-result component is the News results. If the search engines think News results might be useful to you, based on your search — search for a politician or just about any country name, for instance — then you’ll see News results embedded into the results page.

Again, these are from a completely different source; in fact, publishers have to apply to be included in the News results, shown in Figure 2-3. (Google has an established process and takes many sites; see http://support.google.com/news/publisher. Yahoo! and Bing are far more restrictive.)

Figure 2-3: News results will appear for appropriate searches. (All these results are pulled from the news index.)

Notice also in Figure 2-3 that, on the right side, you can see more detailed results related to Angela Merkel. It’s now common on Google and Yahoo! to see this kind of detailed result for searches on the names of famous people, such as politicians and celebrities. (As you can see in Figure 2-5, search engines may also display similar blocks of information for other things, such as famous locations.)

Viewing Video and Image Results

You’ve almost certainly seen video and image results in the search engines (see Figure 2-4). All three of the major search engines index Youtube.com (it’s owned by Google). But they index other sites, too, such as Vimeo.com, Vevo.com, and Metcafe.com. If you want to try getting your videos into the search results, see Chapter 20.

Figure 2-4: Videos are often dropped into the search results.

As for images (see Figure 2-5), it’s possible to encourage the search engines to rank your images high for particular keywords; I discuss that subject in Chapter 24.

Figure 2-5: Images are often dropped into the search results, too.

Getting Friendly with Social Results

In Chapter 19, you find out about the social networks and how to use them to your advantage. The three major search engines incorporate social-network results into the organic index; in other words, they index social-network sites just like any other site.

The different search engines use the data in different ways, and in different ways at different times; for instance, in the past Google has experimented with actually displaying a Twitter feed inside the search results, but decided it didn’t work well. For a while, Google also displayed photos taken from authors’ Google+ accounts next to their search results, but also gave up on that.

So how the data is used varies, but the social networks definitely are important not only in their own right, but also as a way to feed information into the search results. Check out Chapter 19 for more information.

Collecting Bits n’ Pieces

Finally, the search engines often embed little “bits and pieces” into the search results, data totally separate from these other indexes. For instance, search for sunrise 80209 in Google or Yahoo!, and right at the top of the search results you’ll see the time of the next sunrise (see Figure 2-6). Try searching for 173 pounds in usd, in any of the three major search engines, and you’ll see the current exchange rate, British pounds to U.S. dollars.

Figure 2-6: The search engines provide all sorts of weird and wonderful results.

All three also have calculators (try (5674374 / 231) + (12987 * 7), for instance). Looking for a flight? Or movie? Google and Bing will both provide flights, while all three will give you movie times. (Try, say, fly denver to los angeles and the name of a current movie, along with a city and state name.)

Cooking tonight? Well, Google used to provide recipes, but at the time of writing had removed them. No problem, search for lamb on Bing, then click the Also try: Lamb Recipes link that appears at the top, and that’s just what you’ll get. Yahoo!, too; click the More link on the left, then click Recipes. Search Bing for a musician or band, and you’ll get music results.

There are many forms of data being fed into the search results. (Some of the specialty results shown in the preceding examples use rich snippets, information that you can feed to the search engines if you know how to tag the data; see Chapter 7 for information.)

You may want to dig around sometime in your favorite search engine — try all the links and see where they go and read the Help pages to see what fancy tools are available. You may be amazed at what you find.