Who's Controlling Search Engines and Why?
Europe and the U.S. continue to drift further apart on Google search results. Moreover, European parliamentarians and regulators seek ways to restrain Google's discretion over search results. Meanwhile, U.S. courts continue to affirm Google's right to do whatever it wants with search results — paid and organic. Therefore, the question of who's controlling search engines becomes increasingly complex across different jurisdictions.
Why Google Wants Your Money
Google makes money from every click, not just pay-per-click (PPC) but also from their display network. Furthermore, with over two million Display Network sites, reaching over 92% of Internet users, Google wants to make the search experience a good one. Consequently, they earn money either by increasing search market dominance or selling more advertising.
How to Rank Without Paid Advertisement
When Google encourages you to follow their SEO guidelines, they want us to keep using them. Additionally, here are a few SEO tactics that will help you achieve better organic search ranking.
Building a friendly website means making it easy to understand for humans and search engine algorithms. Specifically, the code should be clean and free from technical errors. Moreover, it should be free from spelling and grammatical errors. Importantly, search engines evaluate the quality of your content too.
Your title tag represents the most important on-page factor. Furthermore, it's the first thing users see when performing a search. A well-worded title tag can often entice users to click on higher-ranking pages. Therefore, make sure your title appeals to visitors, encouraging them to click through your listing in search results.
Pictures should have Alt=text descriptions. In other words, give names to the pictures. However, the best practice involves using the same title as the page on the picture. Additionally, remember to optimise the picture size, as speed plays a key part in SEO optimisation tactics.
Understanding Search Engine Business Models
Search engines operate as businesses that survive and earn money as long as we use them. Google, Bing and Yahoo all want your engagement. Nevertheless, there's still a big decision to make regarding SEO strategies.
You must choose between SEO (Search Engine Optimisation, ranking high in organic results) or PPC (Pay-Per-Click ads, the Sponsored Links and purchased ads on Google search). Both can get you on the front page of search engines for targeted terms. However, each has its respective benefits and costs for achieving better organic search ranking.