What Does the Term SERPS Mean?
It sounds like a group of people fighting for freedom...or maybe a new rock band. It's neither. If you are getting into the Search Engine Optimization game in order to increase the rank of your web site, you will see this term many times. This term is one of the more important terms in the promotion industry and, quite possibly, the most important term to you.
SERPs stands for Search Engine Results Pages and the term refers to the page that is returned to you when you search for a web site based on a keyword, set of keywords, phrase, etc. The important thing on a SERP is to rank as close to the top as possible. For example, if you search for the phrase "Small Business" in Google today, you will get a bunch of sites, with www.sba.gov being the first one. This means the SBA site ranks #1 in the SERPs.
Think about how you use search engines. When you do a search, how far do you go down the list of results before you either give up or you try different search criteria? If you are like most people, you only go through 10-15 results before moving on. Now let's say your company sells widgets and when you do a search, your company typically shows up between 25th and 40th position. The typical user will never get to the results for your company.
In order to make sure you show up near the top, you need to select specific keywords that you want your site to rank for and optimize your site to that effect. This includes things like having lots of content on your site that contains the keywords, having people link to you that have the keywords on their site, putting the keywords in your META tags, ALT parameters, file names, ... the list goes on.
By the way, if you search and you put quotes around the words, it become a phrase. A search for words without quotes around them is called a keyword search.
Now you know what SERPs are. Go forth and use the word in a sentence and sound smart.
Currently, John A. Simpson is a Senior IT Professional, owner of Simpson Properties, LLC, a real estate investment company, and an avid blogger. He has 22 years of IT experience and plans to continue his career in Internet-related IT.
AP - Maurice Greene won't be running around the "Dancing with the Stars" ballroom anymore.
