Are you one of the shrinking-but-still-confused group of internet users that are still uncertain about the widely used terms natural or organic when it comes to search engines and search results? Let's take a look; it's actually a lot simpler than you might think.
The internet is currently dominated by three major search engines; Yahoo!, Bing and of course Google. According to Nielsen data from August 2009, Google still has the lion's share of domestic queries at 65%. Yahoo! comes in a distant second with 17% of all search traffic and Microsoft's Bing, growing at 22% month over month now accounts for 10.7% of all Internet searches.
One way to look at it is basically the difference between paid
vs. non-paid advertising online. Let's face it, most everyone wants to be on the top
of the first page of results when users are searching for specific key words or phrases. The easiest
way to do this is to pay for terms that people are searching for, usually on a
bidding system, so that your website will show up higher than your competitors
for a given search result. The second way to look at it is that websites
with the most relevant content matching the terms that users are searching for
show up higher than those with less relevant content. Part of the recognition for relevancy is also represented by how many inbound links there are to your site from other sites. The more that people point to you, the more of an authority you must be is the basic logic but we'll save inbound and outbound linking for another post.
Let's look at Google as an example. When you type in a term
like 'Bankruptcy' into Google, the first thing you'll see in the results at the
top left of the page is Sponsored Links, typically three listings in
a lightly shaded yellow box. If you look to the right of the page,you'll see in the vertically shaded column additional Sponsored Links as well. (Click on the chart to see a larger version.)
The Sponsored Links both across the top and down the right hand side are all paid advertising. The organic or natural results are then listed below on the left hand side. In this case, the news results for this search are pointing to a Wall Street Journal which mentions bankruptcy and then the US Bankruptcy Court page is next.
Check out an earlier post about Search Engine Optimization basics here. You can also read more about Google's recommended SEO practices here.
