Reputation is Everything: Organic Results Matter
Spending as much time as we do online we are all more than accustomed to using the search engines – the portal through which we travel in order to find the websites that we are seeking. We come to the search engines with the desire to find information, goods, or services and we seek out what we need by typing into the search engines keywords or keyword phrases that correlate to what we are looking for; the search engines – armed with these keywords - then deliver us results in the form of pages of relevant websites.
It has been shown statistically that most of us will rarely go beyond the first one or two pages of search engine results. And so it becomes the goal of websites – as a part of their marketing effort known as search engine optimization – to appear on that first or second page of results. This page ranking becomes incredibly important for websites in order to achieve their goal to increase web traffic and ultimately increase the visibility of their site in the online arena.
But what we have all surely noticed is that there are those websites that pay the search engines to be included in the first couple of pages of results returned. These websites are typically featured at the very top of the page of results or in the side bar of the page; they are referred to as sponsored links.
While this paid placement surely allows a website to achieve its goal of higher page rankings, it could ultimately be sabotaging their efforts to increase web traffic. Ask any search engine user and you are likely to find that they are somewhat distrustful of the sponsored links and tend to veer instead toward the general listing of results – known as organic results. These are the websites that organically appear because they are relevant to the search and their search engine optimization efforts have allowed them to be noticed by the search engines.
When promoting a website and working towards the goal to increase web traffic, a website should consider the choice between organic results and sponsored links. Ultimately with the proper search engine optimization tools, websites can achieve their SEO goal of higher page rankings without paying for a spot.