A Search Engine Result Page (SERP) in simple words is the list of web pages that match the query you give in a certain search engine. The first website that is displayed in the list items can be considered as the first SERP.

The SERP generally consists of a title of the web pages, followed by a description of one or two lines and lastly the website links. There are other types of listing, such as the image, map, blogs, news,etc depending upon the search engine offerings. These are special SERPs and are offered by only prominent search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, etc.

The word SERP is directly linked to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a technique used by the website developers in order to get maximum optimization for their websites. SEO is the basis of marketing a website through search engines. If the website link appears in the top position of the SERP, there are more chances that the prospective customer is hooked by it. The more it goes down, the less is the chance of potential hits.

What are Cached SERPs?

Search engine caches a group of websites that contain contents which match with a certain keyword or phrase. Such temporarily stored website links are easily retrieved by the search engine when a user requests for that particular keyword or phrase. Cached search enables the search engines to search a pool of websites that match the keywords and sort them on priority basis. Thus the process of search becomes quite faster compared to the conventional live search that involves the search of the millions of websites for a particular content. The search engines that cache the websites update their cache on a regular basis to make sure that they include the newly added websites in the list.

How are the websites cached?

It is important to know that a website is cached on the basis of its keyword or phrase. A keyword to a website refers to an important piece of information about the website. It is the likely word/phrase that a prospective customer may use in order to get directed to that particular website. For example, if you run a real estate business at Kansas, your website will be better identified by the phrase ‘real estate Kansas‘. Keywords, therefore, are considered as the most important factor in popularizing a website.

There are certain marketing strategies adopted by search engines such as Google in order to improve the optimization of the websites. The most popular among them are Adsense and Adwords programs. By participating in the Adwords programs, you may get your website links displayed along with the similar SERP results. Adsense program is a pay-per-click marketing strategy employed by Google to enhance the visibility of the website by allowing a website to partner with another. These paid programs, however, do not ensure a better page ranking for your website.

A SERP result entirely depends on the query word/phrase and the algorithm of the website page that are in the cache. It does not identify the website on the basis of its participation in the advertisement programs. Therefore, it is the keyword/phrase that determines the SERP position of a website.

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