Chapter 3
Recognizing and Reading Search Results
In This Chapter
- Reading the search engine results page
- Understanding the search results page and why rank position matters
- Identifying how mobile users search
- Discovering the effects of blended search
- Understanding the effect of Google’s Knowledge Graph
- Discovering the impact of semantic search and Hummingbird
In Chapter 2 of this minibook, we discuss organic versus paid results: organic results being the listings that are ranked by perceived merit by a search engine, and paid results (also called sponsored results or sponsored links) being purchased ads that appear along with the organic results. In this chapter, you discover what the rest of the results page means, find out about what gets the most attention on a search page, how search results appear for mobile searchers, and how search engines are adapting to the rising use of voice search.
Reading the Search Engine Results Page
Say that Mother’s Day is coming up and you want to buy your mother a nice bouquet of roses. (Good for you! No wonder Mom always liked you best.) After going to Google and typing your [bouquets] search query into the box, you’re presented with a results page. The results page contains many different listings containing the keyword, or search word, [bouquets], sorted according to what Google thinks is most relevant to you. Figure 3-1 shows a Google results page for the query [bouquets].
Figure 3-1: A typical Google search results page.
Take a look ...
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