Before rethinking search we must establish why do people search online?

For millions of reasons, but they can all be classi‐fied into three main types:

1) Informational search: people looking for information online, such as “who directed Gone with the Wind?”, “currency of Angola” etc.

2) Navigational search: people searching for a specific online location, such as the website of British Airways or the online customer service section of HP computers.

3) Transactional search: people looking for specific items online, often but not always in order to buy, such as a color printer or picture frame.
There are hundreds of search engines online, but only a few of them are used by the majority of searchers. In order of popularity, they are Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. In August 2009, 13 billion searches were performed on Google in the US alone, with 2.8 billion on Yahoo and 1.3 billion on Microsoft’s search sites1. For the purposes of this eBook and for SEO in general, only the top search engines are discussed, with a particular focus on Google.
Search drives traffic
Search is one of the most important sources of traffic for websites, and for new and small websites (which do not enjoy the brand awareness, loyalty or monop‐oly of sites like Amazon, IMDB or Wikipedia) it often accounts for a majority of the traffic.

And traffic is the currency of the internet.

If you have a website – whether you are selling a product, advertising a service or trying to create awareness of an issue – your first goal is undoubtedly to at‐tract visitors; ideally, visitors who are interested in the product, service or infor‐mation on your website.

Scenario: Selling a CD

For the purpose of understanding how search works and why it is relevant to every website owner, imagine that you are selling a CD of relaxation techniques online. Your goal is to bring visitors to your website, ideally those who are inter‐ested in knowing more about or purchasing a relaxation CD.

Your ideal visitor will come to Google or Yahoo and search for “buy relaxation CD” or “relaxation music”. There will be others who will be looking for “relaxa‐tion techniques” or “relaxation tips” as well. The search terms they enter are known as keywords or key phrases.

Every search has an intent or purpose, and a user’s keywords are the first and greatest indicator of his or her intent.

Paid and organic search results

When a user searches for any terms on the major search engines, he sees two kinds of results on the search engine results page (SERP): paid results and organic results. Paid results are also known as ‘sponsored links’ or ‘sponsored results’. This is a form of search advertising based on keywords.

Paid results are the advertisements that search engines display based on the keywords entered by the user. They are clearly marked as sponsored, and every time a user clicks on an advertisement, the search engine makes a little bit of money. The amount depends on the popularity of and competition for that search term. For instance, “color printer” is a much more competitive (and prof‐itable) term than, say, “capital of Russia”; so there will be more sponsored links for the former, and advertisers will pay more for every click. This is also known as Pay‐per‐click or PPC advertising.

Organic search results are the “natural” results, which take up the majority of the search engine result page, and which the user usually assumes are ranked in order of importance or relevance based on the query.

Although this eBook is not about paid search advertising, it is important to know the two biggest ways in which paid search advertising is not as effective as hav‐ing a high natural rank for your keywords:

1) It is costly; you pay for user clicks and have no guarantee of making a sale.

2) Numerous studies indicate that 75‐80% of searchers click on organic results instead of paid links.

Pay per click advertising can work very well, but it is best used as part of an overall marketing strategy which includes search engine optimization for boost‐ing natural rankings.
Various search engine‐related techniques such as SEO and paid advertising to increase a website’s exposure are collectively known as search engine marketing (SEM).

Searching for a relaxation CD

Now imagine your ideal user looking for a relaxation CD online. He opens his browser, navigates to Google and searches for “relaxation CD”. Google will re‐turn nearly 7 million natural search results, and a number of sponsored links on the right based on the search term and other related queries like ‘meditation’ and ‘relaxation music’.

Out of these 7 million search results, the user is, statistically speaking, most likely to click on the top few organic results on the first SERP. The first SERP contains 10 results, and with each decreasing rank his likelihood of clicking on the page decreases. He is also much less likely to click on the second page, especially if he finds what he is looking for on the first page itself.

So lets get down to brass tax!! Rethinking Search

Clearly, it is not accurate to think of search engines as portals or doors to the web – they are more like authoritative guides. Search engines today are ex‐tremely discerning; they organize incredible amounts of information and make recommendations based on rankings which can make or break the fortunes of a website owner.

So in order to attract the right kind of users in large volumes, your website should be featured as a result on the top search engines – with a high rank for the right keywords.
The techniques by which you try to achieve high rankings for the right keywords is known as search engine optimization.