Firstly, let me clarify now what a search engine ranking is. When someone makes a search in a search service like Google, Yahoo, MSN or many of the numerous smaller search services, they type in something they want to know about – this is called a ‘search query’. When they enter that ‘query’ they are then presented by a whole list of results that search service has decided in their mysterious way are relevant search results to the query you want information on. This list of search results is often termed Organic Search Results. These are different to the Sponsored Search Results that often appear down the right hand margin of the search results page, and sometimes can appear at the top of the page shaded in a slightly different background colour.

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