One speedy look at Google (or any of the other major search engines), will demonstrate that the typical search engine results page (SERP), has several clear elements. With Google, these components include:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) or 'sponsored' results.

Usually, these are on the far right of the page, going down the page. For many search terms, there will also be sponsored results at the top of the page, usually just below the search box.

• Products, Local and video

Below these sponsored (PPC) results in the main body of the SERP, will be the more specialist results. These will depend a lot on the particular phrase you searched for. Examples of these specialised results, includes local business results, up to date news results, social networking results (such as Twitter), and videos from YouTube.

• Organic results

Below these results, is where all the natural search results can be found. In all three of the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo), the organic results occupy more of the page. Remarkably, the least popular the keywords or search terms, the fewer sponsored links will be shown, and the greater the area occupied by the organic results.

Popular keywords on the other hand, are handled differently. SERPs for these are often combined with many of PPC and organic results. Standing out through all the clutter for high traffic keywords is very challenging. It is far easier targeting keywords that are less popular, but have a lot lower competition.

On the other end of the scale, are niche (and often long-tail) keywords. For a lot of of these keywords, there are hardly any PPC ads at all, and so all of the results found on the SERP are organic. Doing search engine optimization on your site and your pages for this type of keywords therefore, could result in the greatest conversion rates, as the competition is lower. Many of the leading corporations and brands online will usually optimize their websites for the broadest and most popular search terms possible, irrespective of the conversion rates they are getting out of it. With their almost unlimited budgets, they can often afford such a shotgun approach to marketing.

That said, the vast majority of internet users have more trust in natural search results. Industry bodies and analysts have done lots of research that all come to the same conclusion. Over 60% of internet users do click on organic search results most of the time. Power users, and more experienced internet users actually click on the organic results even more often. Pretty much the only industry where this is not the case, is the insurance sector, where most of their traffic comes from PPC marketing campaigns.

Obviously, using only online advertising, will mean you are not getting the best results of your website promotion efforts. Along with driving traffic, you can build more branding for your site and company name through search engine optimization efforts to improve your organic search results and ranking. Any aspiring site owner, especially one whose target demographic is the internet savvy generation, would therefore do well to put a considerable amount of effort into SEO for their site.

SEO is not brain surgery. Anyone can do it. You can decide how far down the rabbit hole you are prepared to go with it, but you should not ignore it.