Search engine results page

A search engine results page (SERP), is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the Keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.

Query caching

Actually some search engines cache SERPs for frequent searches and display the cached SERP instead of a live SERP to increase the performance of the search engine. The search engine updates the SERPs periodically to account for new pages, and possibly to modify the rankings of pages in the SERP.
SERP refreshing can take several days or weeks which can occasionally cause results to be inaccurate or out of date, and new sites and pages to be completely absent.

Different types of results

SERPs of major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing may include different types of listings: contextual, algorithmic or organic search listings, as well as sponsored listings, images, maps, definitions, videos or suggested search refinements.

The major search engines visually differentiate specific content types, such as images, news, and blogs. Many content types have specialized SERP templates and visual enhancements on the main search result page.

Advertising

SERPs may contain advertisements. This is how commercial search engines fund their operations. Common examples of these advertisements are displayed on the right hand side of the page as small classified style ads or directly above the main organic search results on the left.

Google SEO

Google holds over 60% of the total search market. Its algorithm is naturally also unique, so ranking on Google carries its own unique considerations. Although there are over 200 criteria Google uses to rank sites, they can be categorized into two main sections: on-site and off-site factors:
Google values sites that deliver quality content, relevance, easy navigation and load and an overall user-friendliness to the site’s visitors (on-site). However, a site’s popularity is heavily weighted when Google ranks sites (off-site). Thus Google was originally designed to rank sites mostly based on the number of inbound links they were receiving from other sites. In other words, the more site A was used as a “reference” the higher it would rank. Anchored text links used to link to site A are also very important as well as the popularity and the relevance of the site that is referencing site A.

Increasing prominence

A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to most important pages may improve its visibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web page's meta data, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the "canonical" meta tag or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the url all count towards the page's link popularity score.

File names

Search engines' algorithms prefer descriptive, relevant file names on web pages. For a search engine to interpret a page properly, keywords are more helpful than random characters and numbers. Each page should be optimized for a certain keyword or keyword phrases which should also appear in H1 tag but also in the page file name. Since no spaces are accepted in the file name, hyphens and underscores are preferred.