Keyphrase Highlighting and it’s Effects on Conversion
     United Kingdom, May 03 (2007)

One of the reasons we tend to focus on "organic" search engine optimization (SEO), is that the majority of traffic comes from them. Searchers tend to look at and click on the top results from both the paid and organic listings. However, after carefully evaluating we find that searchers who are truly interested in purchasing a product or service actually dig for information. In other words, they do not hurry while making buying decisions and perform a wide variety of searches before actually making a final buying decision.

Keyphrase Highlighting
You must have seen keyphrase highlighting in Search Engine Result Pages but do you really know why it is present. Whenever a person types a keyphrase into a search box, the query words (keyphrase) are highlighted at various places in the result pages..

Organic listings:
HTML title tags
Meta-tag description or page snippet
URL

Search engine ads:
Ad titles
Ad descriptions
Display URL

The reason that query words are highlighted in these various places is to help searchers feel more confident that they are being delivered to the most relevant search results. This keyword emphasis in search results is commonly referred to as keyphrase highlighting or term highlighting.

But how does keyphrase highlighting affect organic Search Engine Optimization? Contrary to some popular beliefs, the goal of SEO is not to rank but to convert search engine traffic into sales. So we need to encourage searchers to click on the link to our website. To achieve this goal, SEOs need to carefully analyze how their listings appear in organic search results and the corresponding click-through rates (CTRs).