Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's) are the pages you see after you type in a search on Google or other search engines and click on the Search button. Because 90% of people use search engines to find what they are looking for these SERP's are the most important pages on the internet.

The Search Engines Result Pages (SERP's) can be broadly divided into two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and Paid Advertisements usually bought on a "Pay Per Click" (PPC) basis.

Roughly 80% of clicks at Google occur within the organic listings not the PPC listings. This is why is it important to get your site to rank naturally in the search engine result pages. Getting your site to rank high is not tricky; it's just a matter of optimising your website to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with little text your site will not rank high. You need to target each keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search terms “business plans” you need to have one page with the title “business plans” and lots of text about “business plans”.

To me this is just common sense but then I have been working in the SEO field for a number of years. However it never ceases to amaze me why people still call their home pages “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. The owners probably search for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google. This is only good for the customers that know your company which is fine for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you're trying to get customers from for internet users you need to optimise your text for the search engines.

The other aspect of getting high SERPs is trust and authority. It is kind of no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a good reputation. Forgetting the cyber world for a moment, in the real world established businesses have much more clout that new start up businesses. Like your favourite restaurant. If a new restaurant opened up just down the street you might not want to chance eating there and stick with your favourite restaurant. Now if you hear that its gaining a good reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust you get is via an algorithm. The more links you get from already established trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or not relevant website.

Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and using keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a naturally progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and their warning lights flash which means they might look into your site and possibly penalise it.

So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to do everything the search engines like. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily) ,have lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you shouldn't go far wrong.