Introduction

Introduction to how search engines work.

Free- vs paid search

Search results today consists of two parts; organic search results and paid search results.

Organic search results are the «free» ones (we’ll get back to why we say «free» and not FREE), whereas you don’t pay the search engine anything to be listed.

These results are most often listed below a few commercially listed search results, of which a company has paid the search engine to be listed based upon the purchase of some selected keywords.

Both the organic search results and the paid search results end up in what we call the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

SEO takes time - paid search gives you visitors immediately

For commercially-driven websites selling products or services in a competitive market, or if the website is new and you need to get visitors immediately, starting with paid search results is the natural, most time-efficient and even cost-efficient way to move forward.

SEO for paid search

It is also very important to understand that search engines like Google always take into consideration the assumed need from the user. As an example, if there are 20 commercial websites competing on advertising on the terms «winter jacket», then the websites with a higher organic ranking - if such data exists, will be selected and shown, even if some of the websites have set a higher bid for the term in question.

The best for most websites, specially commercially-driven websites selling products or services, is therefore a combination of paid search and search engine optimization.

The SERP, the Search Engine Results Page, where all search results are shown, both paid and free, has evolved much over the years, moving more and more over to prioritize its page real estate to the paid search results, along with more personalized results in search engines like Google (the popular search engine DuckDuckGo works differently, in the way that all users always gets the same search results for a given query).

On-site SEO and off-site SEO

SEO practices is often divided into two main types; on-site SEO and off-site SEO. On-site SEO is everything related to the work on the actual website, being it content or technical setup.

Off-site SEO refer to work not being done on the actual website. External links and external ranking signal improvements are typical off-site SEO work.