Technology From Mars

Sites appear on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in one of two ways: natural results or paid advertisements.  

For most search engines, appearing in the paid ads is just a matter of deciding what terms you want to target and managing your budget.  It takes a little effort, and can result in a bidding war with your competition, but anyone can get a site to appear in the pay-per-click section.  A large number of users will entirely ignore this section on result pages, which is why we concentrate on appearing in the free (natural) results section.  The process of making a site appear in the natural results is called natural search engine optimization, or often just search engine optimization (SEO).

Each search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc) has a proprietary, secret algorithm to determine what sites will appear in the results for a search term.  These algorithms can be incredibly complex and rely on a large number of factors, which change over time.  No search engine will say exactly how much weight is given to each factor, or even exactly what factors are used, but they do release hints and guidance to sites willing to play by their rules.  After all, they want good search results for their end users, and if even the reputable sites don't know what the search engines are looking for, the result pages could end up being useless.

Well known factors in search engine algorithms are meta tags, content keyword density, headline keyword density, domain age, domain keyword density, page load time, standards compliance, bounce rate, user traffic, outbound links, and inbound links, to name a few.  SEO companies are often split into two camps: white hat (following search engine guidelines) and black hat (trying to trick the search engine and manipulate the algorithm).  Search engines change their algorithms whenever they feel black hat companies have figured out ways to cheat the system.  This can often result in their client sites being dropped entirely from the results for violating the search engine guidelines.  We utilize ONLY white hat SEO practices at Technology From Mars.

If you think your site needs better search engine optimization to serve your target audience, we can perform a full audit to determine which factors might be hurting you, if your site is optimized for the correct keywords, and where we can improve your rankings.  Contact us today to start this process and receive an SEO quote.