Search Engine Results Page: How It Can Benefit Your Website

Search engines are the yellow pages of online business. You can pay to advertise your business through a pay-per-click campaign, or you can create an interesting, useful website that meets the needs of a targeted group of customers and then wait for the search engines and Internet to do the work for you. Serious business owners do both.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per click advertising is a great way for businesses to draw traffic and get their name known while they wait for search engines to find and crawl their websites. Pay-per-click advertising is a lot like renting a billboard for your business: Prime real estate positioning costs more. The business owner creates the pay-per-click ads, and they appear under the sponsored results section of a search engine results page. The search engine displays these results prominently and in order according to the amount of money bid by the ad owner for a particular keyword.

If you sell digital cameras, the most desirable keyword for your ads would most likely be "digital cameras," so the competition for this keyword would be fierce. Each contender bids a certain amount of money, usually a few cents to a few dollars, that must be paid to the search engine every time a user clicks on the ad for that business. The highest bidder gets top positioning on the search engine results page.

Pay-per-click keyword positioning changes constantly. You may outbid your nearest competitor for your keyword today, but he may outbid you for the remainder of the week. Some business owners choose to employ a pay-per-click management service to handle their PPC ad campaigns for them, and others enjoy the hands-on experience.

Organic Search Engine Results

Organic search engine results are those that a search engine displays as a result of a user's search for a particular keyword. These positions cannot be bought, as they are organic or natural. Users trust the relevancy of organic results much more than sponsored results. Some users completely ignore the sponsored listings and choose from only the organic results.
Ranking well for an organic search result takes time. It also demands a great deal of work to make the website search engine-friendly and on-topic. This often requires the services of a search engine optimization company. These companies handle the development, promotion and content of a website for the business owner, and they strive to gain top rankings for a given set of keywords.

If a user sees the same website listed under the sponsored results as well as the organic results, he or she may be more confident of that website's relevance to the given keyword. If I search for "Internet Consultant" and see searchcommander in the top spot of the organic results and the third spot under the sponsored listings, this tells me that searchcommander is likely to give me good information about Internet consulting. This also shows that the business owner understands the workings of search engine results and appreciates their importance.

Pay-per-click ads and organic search results can work together to increase your website traffic.