In the natural or organic search engine optimisation listing within Google, you sometimes see Google displaying several links to pages within a site underneath the main link. It is difficult publish this in a listing within the search engine, as google has an automated algorithum which controls the functionality.

Usually it is aimed towards the larger of web sites and usually appears in relation to searches that involve a company name (your company) or specific pages from a web site other than the homepage. Rumor has it backward links containing the company name and therefore attracting a lot of visitors via Google is a main reason that Google applies these to your listing. Most probably Google will have a threshold for the amount of keyword rich links you need before supplying your site with a ’sitelink’.

The sitelinks can be taken from any area within your site and Google does not restrict this to your main navigation, The speculation behind the theory of ’sitelinks’ within the search engine optimisation listings is that it is directly related to the highest search phrase volume on a site.

The algorithim that Google uses to position sites for keyphrases has changed (as it always is).

The most recent change is to devalue a link from a website that is a paid link.

We at First Search SEO keep abreast of all changes to the Google Algorithm and can rest assured we have taken the appropriate action regarding this.

Many people often wonder why all credible Search Engine Optimisation companies charge on going fees, I mean what else is there to do once the sites position has been achieved for its keyphrases?

The answer of course is that it takes a lot of effort to get a site listed for a competitive key phrase and just as much effort keeping it there.  Not many non optimisers are aware that Google continually changes its algorithms and that it is continually revaluating a sites relevancy and trustworthiness to appear for the phrase it has been optimised for.  In short a lot of work has to be done to keep a site listed for its key phrases. The thing most people don’t understand is that that most work that is done to keep a site listed in Google can not be seen within the site.  Without the skills of an optimisation company no site will keep it’s position for long if it just has a one off effort for optimisation and is why ongoing optimisation fees pay dividends in the long run.

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers bid on keywords they believe their target market would type in the search bar when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser’s keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser’s ad may be shown. These ads are called a “Sponsored link” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster/blogger chooses on a content page.

Pay per click ads may also appear on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved.

While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50), these prices are often referred to as Costs Per Click (CPC). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.^[1] The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase “search engine optimization” was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.^[2]

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta-tags provided a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, because some webmasters abused meta tags by including irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for their website and to increase their ad revenue. Cost per thousand impressions was at the time the common means of monetizing content websites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta data in meta tags caused pages to rank for irrelevant searches, and fail to rank for relevant searches.^[3] Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.^[4]

By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

While graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed “backrub”, a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.^[5] PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.^[6] Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered, as well as on-page factors, to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.^[7]

To reduce the impact of link schemes, as of 2007, search engines consider a wide range of undisclosed factors for their ranking algorithms. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.^[8] The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.^[9][10] SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms