What is Your SERP?

When you're setting up your ecommerce business and you chat with other online business owners, many of these people will ask you what your SERP is. That is an acronym (the Internet is just a huge collection of them isn't it?) Search Engine Results Page and in a nutshell, it means where does your site stand when someone queries a search engine using one of the keywords related to your site.

Search engines constantly "crawl" the web reading and indexing text off websites. The robots that do the reading and indexing of these sites are called "spiders". Every piece of text is indexed and queried, although the major school of thought now is Google only reads the first 101K of a webpage and doesn't index beyond that, instead moving on to another page. When someone searches for a site based on a keyword, the returned results from the search engine will be in the order considered the most relevant. The more relevant the site, the higher the SERP.

In addition to search engines crawling your site and indexing it; your website will also be indexed by the various internet directories. An example of a search engine versus a directory is Google is a search engine and Yahoo is a directory which has human editors reviewing the information that the spiders turn in for indexing which ensures a higher quality of returned search content. Though, search engines generally have more information indexed because they are purely automated.

If you want to make sure your site gets the optimum in SERP, you will want to have your ecommerce website as optimized as possible for the spiders when they come crawling. Talk to the professionals at Merchandizer and they can look at your site and give you a quote for making your site as strong an ox in SEO and helping to give you the maximum SERP that your site can attain.