We talk about the SERPs quite a lot in the blog and I thought it might be an idea to answer the question “what is a SERP?”

A SERP, or Search Engine Results Page is the page displayed by a search engine, such as Google, that is generated when you search for something.

In the SERPs you can see the title tag on the webpage that is listed - this is a link to the site.  There is also a description of the page, which is fed from the meta description.

Also displayed on the SERPs are sponsored links or paid search advertising which are controlled by people’s pay per click campaigns.

In some instances you will also see some items from what is known as universal search results – including videos, shopping results and images.

In Google Shopping results are shown as a title of the product a price and the seller name, generally around 3 shopping results are shown and are shown under a title “Shopping results for XX” clicking on this title takes you through to the Shopping search section of Google.  Shopping results are setup using Google Base.

Videos, which tend to be fed from YouTube are also sometimes displayed in the SERPs and include information about the length of the video and a user rating for the video.

If a large number of people perform an image search on the keywords you have entered some images may appear in the SERPs under the heading of “Image results for XX” clicking on this title takes you through to the image search section of Google.

The SERPs show the results that best match the query that you have typed in and can be affected by implementing good SEO on your site.

To help your website appear higher up the SERPs look at ensuring that your site is well optimised for keywords that are relevant to the products and services and try and refresh the content on the site as often as possible to keep the level of relevancy high.