Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being adverts. In contrast, non-organic search results may include pay per click Pay per click is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system advertising. The phrase was coined by writer John Kilroy in an article written in 2006.
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Background
The Google Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an, Yahoo! Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and Bing Bing is the current web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009 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.[1]
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 Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears 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. It is, as of July 2009, now in common currency outside the specialist web marketing industry, being used frequently by Google (throughout the Google Analytics site for instance).
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.
See also
- Internet marketing Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing, or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet
- PageRank PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection
- Organic search engine An organic search engine is a manually operated search service which uses a combination of computer algorithims and human researchers to look up a search query. A search query submitted to an organic search engine is analysed by a human operator who researches the query then formats the response to the user
References
- ^ May/June 2004 Tracking Survey Pew Internet and American Life Project
External links
Categories: Internet terminology Categories: Internet | World Wide Web | Computing terminology | Internet advertising and promotion Advertising and promotion are related to applications that use the Internet, not to the Internet communications network
Market Wire (press release)
Using SearchCenter and Omniture's SEM Consulting team, CreditReport.com can analyze the profitability of paid and organic traffic across multiple engines ...
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