Internet search engines exist to organize the seemingly immeasurable amount of information available on the web. They direct people to pages that are relevant to their searches, pages that discuss the exact keywords they are looking for. For a business that receives the majority of its clientele from search engines, search engine rankings can make or break an e-commerce company.

Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the marketing technique of enhancing a website and its content in order to increase the chances of achieving a high rank on search engine result pages (SERP) under relevant keyword searches.

Search engines are very secretive about their criteria and ranking systems, they continuously update and revise their algorithms (a mathematical formula used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results), and therefore, there is less likelihood of webmasters and search engine optimizers being able to achieve higher rankings by manipulation and spamming.

Each search engine has its own formula and criteria for indexing and ranking pages. One can analyze SERPs and backward links (all the links pointing at a particular web page) and attempt to determine a search engine’s indexing criteria, however, there is a lot of risk involved in relying on a limited number of optimization techniques.

Because of the unpredictable nature of search engines, a website can easily move from a top ranking position on a SERP down to the third or fourth SERP or even banned from the search engine altogether.

To Trust or Not to Trust

There are so many unethical SEO companies that claim to be able to achieve your website #1 rankings, they use overwhelmingly aggressive marketing techniques, and attempt to manipulate search engine results, that they give the industry a bad name.

The main problem with SEO companies is that they base their methods and techniques on research, trial and error, and speculation. As a result of the secretive indexing criteria of search engines, webmasters and SEO companies can only make an educated guess about the ranking systems and possible algorithm revisions.

SEO companies may be able to achieve high rankings in search engines for your website, they are good at what they do, however it is the way they do it that is precarious and dangerous.

Some SEO companies may use ‘black hat’, techniques to manipulate search engine results to their advantage. These techniques are high risk or illegal and can get a site banned from search engines. Black hat techniques can cuase seevere damage to the business of an e-commerce company.

A few examples of ‘black hat’ techniques:

• Hidden text/hidden links: stuffing your pages with keywords or links too small to read or the same color as the background, so viewers are unable to see any difference in the aesthetics of the page.

• Cloaking: using browser/bot sniffers to serve the search engine spiders a different page than the page visitors see. It is used to show an optimized page to the search engines and a different page to viewers.

• Mutiple submissions: submitting your domain and pages to search engines, for example submitting http://www.logobee.com and http://www.logobee.com/samples as two seperate urls.

• Link farms: sites created soley for the purpose of search engine ranking. These sites are nothing more than random links which have no relevance to one another.

• Selling PR: sites that sell their high PR links for a fee through direct advertisement and for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity.

• Doorways: having one page stuffed with keywords that re-direct to another more user friendly page.

• Meta tag abuse: having too many keywords in the meta tag description, title and keywords.

I am not implying that all SEO companies use ‘black hat’ techniques, there are some that use safe techniques, however I am only pointing out that relying on an SEO company to achieve top rankings for your website is a gamble.

As Easy As ABC

You don’t have to be a computer genius to achieve higher search engine rankings for your website. Effective search engine optimization can be done by anyone who has the time and determination. There exists hordes of information, suggestions, ideas, methods and tehnicques about successfully optimizing your website for search engines. SEO companies do not use any ‘special’ tactics that we don’t already know or that we can’t easily research on the internet.

Safe SEO techniques:

• Content: Add valuable and relevant content to your site. The more content the better. Keep your paragraphs brief and to the point.

• Continuously update your website: Add new information and new pages to your site. Create a section on your home page containing up-to-date news items relevent to your business.

• Link popularity: Participate in link exchanges that are relevant to your business or that compliment your business. The more inbound links, the more important your website is perceived to be by the search engine spiders. Progressively build your links. Do not add 500 links to your site at one time.

• Site maps: Include a site map on your site. Site maps can help your visitors easily surf your site.

• Meta tags and Alt tags: Meta tags contain information about the website, placed in the HTML header of a web page, that is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags relevant to search engines are title, keyword and description tags. Title tags are the most important tags because they contain the information that a viewer sees concerning your website on a search engine results page. Choose a title that clearly represents your business. Make sure that your all your tags contain relevant keywords. Alt tags describe the graphical elements in a web page.

• Header tags: Header tags (H1, H2, H3….) are tags used to represent headers and important titles. Use H1 tags for the most important headers, H2 for the next, etc…As well, use bold, italics, underlines, and different font sizes. Spiders and bots give high value to sites that contain a variety of text and font sizes.

• Keep it simple: Make your site simple and viewer friendly. Make you site easy to surf, eye-catching, informative and interesting. Keep in mind that surfers have a short attention span.

• Stay away from large images and Flash images. Spiders have a preference for html text sites.

• Keyword density: Keywords should exist in your title tag, headline tag, description tag and throughout the content of your home page as well as other internal pages. Be careful not to over do it though.

• Informative and authoritative: Include authorative articles pertaining to the topic of your business, FAQ, tips, how-to’s, etc..

• Participate in SEO and webmaster forums to keep up to date on SEO techniques and search engine criteria revisions. Read websites and articles on various SEO suggestions.

• For other safe optimization techniques see Google’s guidelines for webmasters (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html).

SEO companies are by the dozen, attempting to lure you in, convincing you to believe that they, and they alone, can help you attain top position results on search engines. While you consider whether to go with an SEO company or not, you may want to do some research on the SEO industry. You can find some helpful information at http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html.
Instead of spending big bucks on achieving big results, take initiative, do it yourself. Don’t spend endless hours worrying about search engine results and crawling spiders. While keeping in mind basic SEO techniques, customize your web site for your human users and not for spiders and bots.

Bio: Colleen Ryan is the Art Director of Logobee Inc., a logo design firm that designs high quality logos and corporate identity design for businesses worldwide. Logobee Inc. was founded in 2000 and since then the company has grown at an exponential rate.
http://www.logobee.com

All of us, the authors, know that to enhance our sites’
listings in search engines we need to do certain things and
some of them are :

(a) get fresh content on our sites on regular basis
(b) get backlinks from high PR (page-rank) sites

Get Fresh Content:

Inserting RSS Feeds on related subjects is a great way to
create automatic fresh content in a website. However, we
can also put our own published articles in a section, say,
‘My Articles’. Many authors aim to write at least one article
every week. So, every week whenever search engine robots
come to our sites, they can get fresh content.

Get Back-links:

Back-links are considered an important factor in search
engine placements. When we submit our articles in article
directories, we get a link back from those sites. Mostly all
article directories have good PR (page rank). The benefit
of submitting articles in article directories is that not only
is there a fair chance of getting our articles published, but
also our articles get published in many other web sites with
our resource boxes. So, when different sites link to our site
from a related page (the page where our articles are
published), there are chances that search engines would
look at our sites respectfully and rank us well. So, submitting
articles to article directories is a good choice. We get link
back from a page, which talks about related subjects.

Actually, upto this part, I have not talked about anything
special. Authors write free articles knowing these features.

But, how many of our articles are positioned high in the
search engines? If not, what could be the reason?

Outbound Links:

The another important factor of ranking high in search engines
is ‘Outbound Links’. Search engines consider this factor equally
important as back-links. As back-links from related sites are
important, outbound links to related sites are equally important.
In fact, that’s one of the main reasons why mostly all article
directories have high PR. Because, in every article directory,
there is a huge amount of outbound links. And each outbound
link is sent out to a related site from a page where the subject
is being discussed!

Sometimes we exchange links with related sites and both the
parties put those link in a seperate pages. That ‘links page’
contains only links and links — no content! So, how would
search engines consider them as valid outbound links?

How can authors like me factor this element in our sites?

Not many of us would want to link out to sites which are of
our competetors. But wait, article writers can do this wisely.

As I have discussed above, authors should publish their own
articles in their own sites, before submitting them to article
directories. There is a reason for this. When multiple sites
publish our articles, the search engine finds duplicate content
in large number of sites. Therefore, search engines list on
top the site from where it got the article first. So, if we publish our own articles first on our sites, it is possible that our own sites would be listed on the top of all other sites that
published our articles.

After submitting the articles to article directories, we should
keep track of when our articles are published in those
directories. Most of the directories inform us when when our
articles get published. We must visit those sites and get the
URLs of our articles.

Let us put the links of those pages in article pages of our
sites. If we put, “These article is also published by :” with
a list of links of the sites where those particular articles are
published, we cleverly send out links to pages where our
subject is discussed. This will definitely help us creating
authenticated outbound links and rank well in search engines
without hampering our businesses.

Subhendu Sen is the owner and the webmaster of The Web Content
- an article directory, which uses XML/RSS feeds. Authors
may also submit their articles at: http://www.thewebcontent.com

If you’ve been feeling like Tom Cruise climbing up the side of some remote jagged mountain in the blazing hot sun and concerned you’re facing “mission impossible”, chances are you own a web site.

Adding to the intense thrill of web site ownership are keyword comparisons and bidding for good keyword positions in search engines. You might hire a search engine optimization specialist who can track elusive algorithm clues and is unfazed by page rank drama. Your programmers and designers insist they get along. The marketing department actually believes deadlines are met. The new bank account is waiting for fresh revenue. And oh yes, it’s assumed someone will come looking for your web site and wants to use it.

You did build it for them, right?

For every search result, there is the possibility that:

a. The engine will display a description that makes sense. Or not.

b. The page the search engine refers to does what the description said it would do and is about what the search engine said it would cover. Or not.

Your SEO/SEM, if you hired a good one, helped you write your title tag statement and Meta page description and structured it so it makes sense in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Your Usability professional, if you hired one, evaluated the page to make sure it would meet customer expectations and convince visitors there are other hot pages inside the web site to look at too. Without call to action prompts, well displayed, logically labeled navigation links and credible content, the chance of someone remaining on that page is pretty slim.

Says Gordon Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc., in a recent Search Day article written by Shari Thurow, called Creating Compelling Search Engine Ads and Landing Pages, “Once searchers arrive on your landing pages, you have 13.2 seconds to convince visitors that they are on the right site.”

Impossible Mission?

Had enough of web page abandonment? Are those cost per click fees putting you further in credit card debt and not producing any bang for your buck? Which part of “understand your web site visitor” didn’t make it to the drawing board?

I know this is hard. You’re not a mind reader. Unless you have access to costly studies and data about who to build your web site for and their computer usage habits, chances are you simply wanted a web site and hoped people would find it and use it. By incorporating the skills and expertise of an SEO/SEM along with a user centered design specialist, you will not be wastefully tossing your web site off the search engine cliff. Rather, your adoring fans will clamor up the cliff to get to it.

Sometimes a web designer is also trained in these fields or is partnered with people who are. This is something to consider when shopping around for web site assistance.

Here are some things to keep in mind when studying your web site. You can also ask your team to consider these points.

1. What happens after your site reaches top rank? It’s lonely up there, if nobody notices your page or understands the page description. How effective is high rank? Do people really click on “sponsored” pages vs. natural results?

2. Pay attention to inside “landing” pages. Optimize them for easy indexing and point visitors to your homepage, sale products or free stuff.

3. Be wise about what you invest. Every cost per click must be productive. If not, a usability web site review can locate roadblocks.

4. It’s about the user experience. Really. It’s a common habit for web site owners to create the site for themselves based on what they like and want. When you receive a complaint, consider it a favor. Yes, some people are mean and critical. But, enhancements are improvements that sometimes benefit a lot of people, and you too, in the long run.

5. Don’t settle for minimum effort. One of your goals is to reach potential customers and readers. Your optimized pages reach people looking for them. Your user centered pages reach people wanting to use them and will refer them to friends.

6. Your competition does it better. Not by packing hidden keywords and buying links, but by carefully targeting keywords, providing cleverly written content and delivering user centered design.

7. Think sustainability. If you plan on your web site being around for a while, make this a checkpoint for every future decision related to your site. If someone has an idea that won’t impact the long-term sustainability of the site, the site may disappear out of sheer user boredom. And search do engines notice.

8. Understanding your visitors and customers allows for more creative keyword combinations. Put a feedback form on your web site. Ask them how they found your web site. Ask them what keywords they used. Ask them why they came or what they wanted to find. Ask them if they found what they were looking for and if not, provide room for comments so they can explain what happened. This information is a gold mine for you.

9. Never mislead your visitors. Be accurate with what you say a site or page is about. Search results relevancy establishes trust from the start.

10. The elegance of action. The act of landing on a relevant, accurate, persuasive, interesting page leads to the fluid, unencumbered desire to know more and click deeper. Aim for this.

Do not drop your web site over the search engine cliff without considering the usability effect. Design it to be productive and user centered. This will pay off in many ways. Remember your original requirements and goals and trace back every dollar you spend to meeting them. Marketing efforts are strengthened when you make your visitors feel welcome, informed and productive once they arrive at your web site.

Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of http://www.UsabilityEffect.com, http://www.Cre8pc.com & http://www.Cre8asiteForums.com Her background in organic search engine optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers unique insight into web site development.

Copyright 2004 Cre8pc.com

Search Engines… one of the MOST tricky marketing tactics of them all online simply because the SE’s are forever changing the rules of Website Optimization.

Meaning… what used to work “Yesterday” might not work “Today”.

Now, with that said, for the remainder of this article I want to let you in on what SE’s ‘LOVE’ and will thank you for everytime you hand them over some.

It’s really not much of a mystery to those of you who have been marketing online for some time But for those of you who haven’t this is something you should seriously consider getting into for more reasons than ONE.

OKAY. Enough of the small talk. I’m going to dive straight in and get to the point Right Now on what SE’s ‘LOVE’ and it’s simply…

… CONTENT!

That’s right, “Content” is what SE’s ‘LOVE’ and are continually crawling the Internet for Day and Night 24/7/365 and will gladly pay your website a visit if you supply it on a Daily, Weekly or Monthly basis.

The more often you supply “Content” and post it on your website the more often SE spiders will come CRAWL and “index” your website pages.

The question is… “do you write Articles?”

If you don’t, maybe you might want to consider it.

Now that you know what SE’s ‘LOVE’, your probably wondering what the BEST way is to get the SE spiders attention to get them to come on over and CRAWL your website.

Well, first off I would recommend you submitting your Articles(whether you have some already or plan on starting) to ‘Article Directories’ simply because SE spiders are constantly CRAWLING these websites since they are SO full of content and are updated usually on a daily basis.

You can find them by simply typing in “article directories” into your favorite search engine’s search field.

The other great thing about ‘Article Directories’ is they usually have HIGH ‘PR’(Popularity Ranking) which is another KEY thing SE’s take into consideration which means once you’ve posted your articles on that directory or directories, the spiders will eventually ‘Find’ your article, crawl that page within that Article Directory and follow the corresponding links within your “Resource Box” back to your website.

The more article directories you post to, the more chances you’ll have at getting some SE spider activity on your website, crawling and indexing your webpages.

This is just ONE of the ways to get SE spiders to come visit your website and only ONE reason WHY you should submit your Articles to ‘Article Directories’ but that’s another article within itself.

For the remainder of this article I’m going to share with you a way to get SE spiders to come visit your website within the next 24 to 48 hours to have a look around.

Are you ready?

BLOGS!

Blogs are simply the Fastest WAY to get the SE spiders attention to come and take a look simply because Blogs contain “Content” in the form of “Articles” and/or “Reviews or just general feedback from your readership.

The more often you post to your Blog the more often SE spiders will come visit.

The reason IS… everytime you post to your Blog it’ll PING(Ping is simply a signal being sent out telling the SE that there’s NEW content to come and index at your Blog) …the SE’s(Not all of them) …to come take a look.

When they come visit, they’ll spider your Blog and will follow all corresponding links within.

Remember the “Resource Box” located at the end of a article(you can use mine as an example) with all the authors website information and URL. This will come in handy so make sure You carefully think about what you put their with your articles.

Now, with that said, I wrote an earlier article explaining how to set-up a Blog to get Yahoo! and MSN to come visit. It’s really quite simple, so don’t worry yourself to much about it being difficult.

All you need to really focus on is supplying the “Content”.

Here’s the link if you wish to read the article:
http://www.internetwondersezine.com/article_13.html

I also wrote another article explaining what Blogs are for those of you who aren’t very familiar with them yet.

Here’s the link if you wish to read the article:
http://www.internetwondersezine.com/article_12.html

Now, there are many other ways to get SE spiders to come visit your website but these two methods I mentioned above are in my mind the quickest.

So, there you have it, “Search Engines… What They LOVE and HOW-TO Get Them To Come CRAWL Your Website”, so go NOW and give it a try.

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The following are a list of mistakes can ensure that your site maintains a low ranking with the search engines. Avoid at all costs.

* Specifying no title for your page *

I cannot stress how important the title of a web page is. Failing to specify a descriptive, keyword optimized title will do untold damage to your ranking with the search engines. It is the equivalent to owning a shop and boarding up its windows. Ideally each page on your site should have a unique, content-specific title.

* Excessive use of images or Flash animation on a page *

If your web page has plenty of nice-looking graphics and eye-popping Flash animation and not a lot of textual content it may indeed look nice but have you ever considered what how the search engines might see it.

Search engines thrive on textual content, scavenging as much text as they can but unfortunately they cannot understand images or Flash animations like we can and so will find nothing of real value on your page. Try to balance your page so that the textual content is given priority and that any images or animations are used only when needed. Also it is a good idea to attach some text to an image by using its ALT tag as search engines use this text when determining rank.

* Complicated menu systems *

Search engines spiders that crawl through our pages are a relatively primitive bunch. They find in hard to navigate complicated menu systems implemented for example in JavaScript or as a Java applet. Just because it is easy for a human to navigate through the site never assume it will be as easy for a search engine spider. A menu system using simple textual links will be easier for a spider to understand and it will be able to successfully navigate your site. A lot of the time complicated menu systems can be replicated using textual links and CSS.

If you must use a complicated menu system be sure to provide a site map that is clearly accessible from the homepage of your site and contains only textual links to your pages. This ensures that even if the spider cannot understand your menu system that it will be able to find the pages on your site.

Frank Kilkelly is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Expert and Webmaster at http://www.seo-ireland.com/, a complete search engine optimization resource. The highlight of the site is an SEO forum http://www.seo-ireland.com/forum/ for discussion of the latest techniques and tips to improve the ranking of your web site.

No matter who you are or how much you pay for web site advertising, free search engine traffic is probably responsible for a big part of your business. So why make your web site so hard for search engines to figure out?

Luckily, it seems like in the recent years people have paid attention to SEO, moved their sites over to CSS, abolished “table” and “font” HTML tags, started using the H1 tag around their titles… and in general, moved the main content of their site as close to the top of the HTML document as it can go.

“But Robert,” you tell me, “I have a bunch of fancy JavaScript and CSS at the top of my site that I don’t want to get rid of.”

That’s ok, you can keep it. Just stash it away in another file. By that I mean… if you were lazy and included your CSS right in the HTML document like this:

(style type=”text/css”)
(!–
CSS code in here
–)
(/style)

Copy all that text out and delete it from the HTML page.

Remove the “style” tags and the “(!–” and “–)” stuff. Open a new text file, paste the text from the clipboard in, save the file as “layout.css” then save and upload to your web server.

Now, back on your HTML page, place HTML code like this:

(link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.example.com/layout.css”)

When someone loads your page in a browser that tells them to look to the URL http://www.example.com/layout.css for the CSS info. But when the search engines crawl your site they will see a nice, clean, simple layout.

You can do the same thing with JavaScript. Say these are your “script” tags:

(script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”)
(!–
JavaScript code in here
–)
(/script)

Do the same thing, copy the JavaScript code but NOT the “script” tags themselves or the “(!–” or “–)”. Erase the original from the HTML page. Paste the stuff you copied into a new text file and call it something like: “functions.js”

Upload functions.js and in the spot you had your JavaScript code use this:

(script language=”JavaScript”
src=”http://www.example.com/functions.js”)(/script)

One important thing to remember is that NO JavaScript code can be placed between the “script” tags if you use the “src” parameter like that.

So remember: use H1 tags, use meta description tags, and use CSS, but make sure you include your JavaScript and CSS stylesheets in separate files otherwise there’s no point.

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The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin (http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser (FireFox). It showed grey.

Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typed in ’site:www.tigertom.com’: no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites of mine: ditto.

What had happened?

TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely.

Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and ‘AdSense scraper’* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its ‘SERPs’**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn’t announce these purges. They are inferred.

To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages†.

The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as ‘collateral damage’. I say theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won’t tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers.

In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like spam, they were effectively doorway sites.

My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids.

Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their ’spammer’ profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on; honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy.

Like me.

I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here’s how:

1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typing ’site:www.yourdomain.com’ without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all …

2. You check Google’s webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules.

3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently.

If you’re familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:

- Send a 410 ‘Gone’ response to requests for the offending pages, or

- CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 ‘Forbidden’ response, or

- Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or

- Just delete them.

Don’t try to be clever. Just get rid of them.

4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type ‘Re-inclusion request’ in the subject box of the form.

4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com,

4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,

4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.

Don’t try to be clever. Don’t argue. Don’t lie. Don’t waffle.

Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your
site, he’ll look for the offending content, and compare it against
their cache. He’ll spend about two minutes on it; don’t give him a reason to continue to exclude you.

4d. You ask for re-inclusion.

5. You wait.

In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn’t work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that’s all that should be necessary.

They emailed a standard reply saying “the problem had been passed to their engineers”. That’s good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.

A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I’m not so vulnerable again, I’m splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of ‘best not to have all your eggs in one basket’.

Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your ‘money-maker’. Spend less time on search engine optimisation and more on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to your site. Easy(!)

——

* A site specifically set up to host Google Adsense advertisements (http://www.google.com/adsense). Usually of low quality, consisting of pages of links to other web sites, text copied from free-print articles, and a big Google ad block ‘above the fold’.

** Search Engine Result Pages

† Doorway pages are low-quality keyword-rich web pages whose sole purpose is to lead the viewer to the ‘real’ content, usually whatever the site is selling.

About the author: T. O’ Donnell (http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk/) is an ecommerce consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK. His latest project is an ebook on buying property in Spain (http://www.tigertom.com/spanish-property-for-sale.shtml). His blog can be read at http://www.ttblog.co.uk/.

It’s interesting how potential clients have preconceived notions about which aspects of search engine marketing have the most value. In fact, they tend to fall into two camps that are 180° apart. The first camp believes completely in the value of pay-per-click marketing (PPC). It’s easy to understand why. PPC provides immediate and measurable benefits. The ROI of PPC marketing is obvious. This group doesn’t understand why it’s necessary “to bother” doing SEO. The second camp believes the only way to go is SEO. Clicks are free and the branding benefits of high rankings have been well documented.

The right answer is that they are both valuable. Each has its benefits and when you can afford to, you should implement both.

Pay-per-Click

PPC makes sense if you want immediate benefits and like the idea of paying for performance. SEO provides branding benefits and longer-term will provide an ROI that is compelling. But unlike PPC, SEO revenue results aren’t as directly measurable and manageable.

Pay per click (PPC) gives you the ability to have complete control over your search traffic. With PPC programs you select the keywords and write the listings. You control where you’re listed and what the listing says. You decide what your budget is and can adjust your spend rate based on results or events (e.g. announcements, promotions).

By tracking results from a PPC campaign, you can build up a knowledge base with respect to your business, including which messages perform the best, which search terms have the best conversion rates, and what destination URL is best for specific users to land on. Over time, this knowledge can help you to improve and define your business.

One of the greatest attractions of PPC is the ability to easily track clicks and costs allowing you to understand your ROI from a specific marketing initiative. This gives you confidence to spend money and drive volume. You may have thought that spending $5,000 a month on a PPC campaign is way outside your budget, but once you measure the ROI, you may realize that it’s well worth the investment.

Search Engine Optimization

So, if PPC is so great why bother with SEO? Basically, because you will be missing out on a large number of potential clicks. How large? A number of recent studies have demonstrated that there are still a lot of users that do not click on the “paid” listings but rather will search through the regular editorial search results. The accompanying chart shows that 60% of the search users prefer (some exclusively) organic over paid listings. The only way to get optimized (high) rankings in these regular editorial results is through an effective SEO program. In most cases, once you have good positioning in the regular search results, you will continue to receive “free” traffic. Again, based on data from a number of marketers the increase in traffic due to SEO averaged 73%. Consider search engine optimization the same as you would word of mouth advertising or public relations. It’s exposure that comes with a very high degree of credibility and trust. Traffic coming from traditional search listings tends to have high conversion rates.

There’s another advantage to traditional search listings. They are considered unbiased and non-commercial. Traditional search performs very well at certain points in the buying process. When consumers are gathering information about a purchase, they show a marked preference for traditional search listings. When they are ready to buy online, they seem to have less bias against paid placement listings and their likelihood to click on one of these listings increases.

The Dollars and Cents of SEO

Perhaps the most compelling reason not to exclude SEO from your online marketing strategy comes down to dollars and cents. In an attempt to quantify the business case for SEO I have gone back and done some analysis on three recent SEO engagements and the results they achieved. I chose ecommerce clients that we had optimized and reviewed their average sales before and after SEO was implemented. In two of the situations the only change made was the optimization of the site. In another the optimization occurred at the same time we implemented a PPC campaign. In the first two cases the store sales rose 64% and 75% after the SEO was implemented. In the third case the store revenue actually went up a staggering 169%, but if you back out the sales that were a result of the PPC campaign, the store revenue that could be attributed to SEO improved by 49%. In other words, the average improvement in store revenue that was apparently due to SEO was 62%.

Can we be sure that all of this was a result of SEO? No. There could have been product, seasonal and other effects that contributed. But I think it’s safe to say that there was a significant increase that resulted directly from the SEO. The bottom line: search optimization has a real and measurable impact on traffic, conversions and revenue (or lead generation) improvement. Given that these clicks begin to approach “free” after amortizing the cost of SEO over time, the ROI for SEO is compelling. Added to the branding benefits no marketer or business owner should doubt the value of search engine optimization.

About the Author

Scott Smigler has been an evangelist for a serious, ROI-based focus on the online channel since he founded Exclusive Concepts (http://www.exclusiveconcepts.com) in 1997. Exclusive Concepts provides integrated online marketing strategies, Internet brand consulting, search engine marketing campaigns and results-oriented web sites for hundreds of clients that range in size from small ecommerce firms to public companies.

Search engines are one of the best tools to bring targeted traffic to your business. Millions of people are always using them every day to search for information that’s suitable to them. Understand that this gives you an advantage to give your prospects whatever they are looking for.

This means that you will get very targeted prospects because they are locating your web site in their system with the use of keywords and phrases related to your product.

This is the Power that search engines have. Now you need to know the down fall to search engines. The reason why most people are not creating success with them is because they are always using automated softwares, they are not getting listed in the major search engines and they are not providing great content.

Now don’t get me wrong, some automated software that you can use for Search Engine Submittions can help you increase your link popularity and that will eventually increase your search engine ranking and further more increase your traffic.

There are thousands of search engines, but not all of them are worth advertising on. Some of them are very small and almost no one uses them to do any searches for anything. You need to get listed in the top searh engines before you worry about getting listed anywhere else.

Automated softwares are great but you need to track them and see if they are giving you any good results. I use automated softwares the ones I use give me good results all other one were garbage.

Remember that marketing with search engines are not that easy, they are a highly competitive field and everyone wants to know the latest tips, trick and secret to getting a top ranking.

One Simple Solution or Formula that I can give you would be to offer great content for the search engines to use.

That’s what the search engines are looking for today, they are looking for great content. You will get ranked higher and keep your position in the search engines if you help them by offering them content that people will want to search for.

How do you offer great content for search engines?

1.) I would search for major key words in the search engines and see other people sites and see the kind of content they are offering and then you should try to emmulate them.

2.) Start making links to popular sites that people would be interested in and start exchanging links with them. It will get you ranked higher over time.

3.) Start writing brief articles and use your major key words in them. Use it in the paragraphs and use them at least three time.

4.) List your site in the appropriate catagories.

Other options… There are advertising companies that offer guaranteed high listings for your page. They index the page for you and do everything necessary to put your page in the top of the major search engines with the keywords that you provide to them.

You should mainly focus on having hundreds of links linking to your web site… It seems like, that’s the most important way to get high ranking these days in the search engines…

I even did a little bit of research and I have found out that most of the people that were ranked high in Google had 1,000s of links linking to them.

Therefore if you have an affiliate program or link exchange program, now is the time to take advantage of it, use it to try to get thousands of people to link to your site, it will pay off when you see yourself ranked high in Google and all the other giant search engines.

Whatever you do, you shouldn’t give up on search engines, there will always be a spot for you in them.

Copyright © 2005 by Koffi Amouzouvi

Koffi Amouzouvi is the “author” of a FREE Newsletter
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