Search engine optimization - SEO, website traffic

Most of us would have heard of SEO companies talking highly of their efforts but there are only a few who make sense. it’s understandable that many take the bait and start paying for “top results and submission to everything”. After all, who doesn’t want their site to be highly ranked by search engines? There is no way anyone can guarantee that your site is the number one result unless they actually control the search engine results, or if the top ranking is for a word or phrase that only exists on your site, of course. If you contact someone regarding optimising your site, ask them what they will do for your site. If they suggest any kinds of shady methods, be very careful. They might get you penalised or even banned from search engine indexes.

Results do not come overnight. If you’re working on improving the search engine positioning of a client’s site, you should probably explain this to them early on. Whatever your site is about, the content needs to be unique and/or specific enough to appeal to people. More specifically, it needs to be useful to the people you want to find your site. Often, the client wants to write their own copy, which is fine if they’re good at it and keep adding new content. In my experience, that is rarely the case. If at all possible, try to make the client realise that they should hire someone to help them write, or at least get someone to help them edit what they have written.

Whatever you do, don’t use the same title text for all documents. Doing so will make it much harder for search engines, people browsing through search results, and site visitors to quickly find out what the document is about. Use search engine friendly, human readable URLs. This will help both your ranking and your users. I’ve seen incredible improvements in search engine results from just changing the URL scheme of a site. Also incidently in my experience incoming links are less important the more specific and unique your content is. Remember, Google is blind, so even if you don’t care about blind people using your site (which you should), you’ll still want it to be accessible. This means that you should use real headings, paragraphs, and lists, and avoid using anything that may interfere with search engine spiders. Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe your site in their search result listings, so if possible, make its contents unique and descriptive for every document.

Worldwide web is place where every body feels like “Oh, It’s easy, I can do it. I can create a website.”.

 Yes you can create a website, but is that all you need.

There is over a billion website and number is as huge as population of the world today.

Any body who wants to establish here, like any other field, needs to workout his goals like :

• What kind of website do you want to create?
• Who you think will like your work?
• Is there space for one more website?
• How will you market?
• How many visitors you need to break even?
• and most important! what is the moto of your website?

Only after you get answers to these question, you should move forward towards development and marketing of website.

Paid placement bids are very dynamic. Once your site moves to 1stposition, I can assure you that any competitor worth their weight will adjust their bids. If your campaign is not being watched closely, your site will drop. Aggressive PPC campaigns need to be reviewed once a day at a minimum.

Monthly reviews and adjustments are too late. PPC Seems ExpensiveIt sounds expensive, sure. But in reality a business is able to get extremely targeted traffic, at a national level for a few cents a click. Compare that to the cost of an ad in the phone directory. A phone directory ad is expensive and they provide exposure to your business in a limited geographic region with limited space to insert your information.

Answer these two questions:

◊ When was the last time you used a search engine to find something? When we ask this question in our workshops the answer is usually “this morning”.

◊ When was the last time you pulled out the phone directory to look up something? The answer? Usually “a couple weeks ago”, at best.

Now, we’re not suggesting you stop advertising in the phone directory. In fact for some businesses, the phone directory is the place to put the majority of your advertising dollars. However, statistics show (and our own workshop polls confirm), people are turning first to the search engines to find what they need. Your business needs to be there. PPC is a way to get you there fast.

Well… that depends. As is true in pricing of most things it’s based on supply and demand. The more competitive the industry and the more companies that want the word, the more expensive it is.

Here are some benchmarks for you to consider.

 ◊ In most popular PPC engines, there is a minimum bid of .10 cents.

â—Š The average cost of a keyword (across all types of words and all industries) is .38 cents.

So you can see, it’s all over the board. One of the first steps in a PPC campaign strategy is a keyword analysis which can provide you with a list of good phrases to target and the budget required to stay visible in the phrases.

Pay per Click advertising is the process of paying for a high rank in asearch engine. Some of the PPC engines rank based on highest bid; others use a mixed algorithm of highest bid and click popularity of the ad for the site. So that we don’t get to technical, we will refer to the highest bid throughout this document. Just remember, in some PPC engines a few other factors come into play.

For each targeted keyword phrase (hereafter referred to as keyword) you need to indicate how high you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. If you are paying the highest bid for a keyword, then your site will be listed first. If you have the second highest bid, your site will be listed second, and so it goes. Let’s take an example. You want to target the keyword “accounting software for architects”.

One of your competitors currently holds the highest bid at .25 cents. To have your listing come before theirs would require you to bid .26 cents. This bumps them to second place. So PPC is somewhat like an auction. The grand prize (1stplace position) goes to those firms willing to pay the most. 2nd Place Isn’t So BadThere are significant advantages to being near the top, but it is often not necessary to be in the 1stposition. Your business will receive nearly the same exposure in 2ndand 3rdplace and these positions are more budget friendly.

Where exactly your listings appear depends on the engine and the rank you’ve paid for. First, second and third place paid listings usually have strategic advantages in placement in that they are listed above the natural or organic listings. Listings in third place and beyond are listed to the right of the natural or organic listings. You can see examples of PPC placement listings for Google on the next page.

“All my business is local, I don’t need national exposure.” PPC isn’t just for national market arenas. A PPC strategy can be crafted to target a local audience as well. The best part is that a PPC campaign with a local or regional focus is usually quite inexpensive. Getting A PPC Campaign GoingThe immediacy of PPC gives it a huge advantage when compared to an organic search engine optimization strategy.

A campaign can be up and running within a couple days. Click Fraud“What prevents my competitors from clicking on my ads until my budget runs out?” This is probably the most often asked question. The search engines employ technology that allows them to detect when click fraud is occurring. Essentially they look for repetitive clicks from the same internet connection within a short period of time.

If too many clicks are received, the clicks are negated and not charged to your account. ConversionsA key success metric of PPC campaign is the conversion rate. A conversion is an action you would like a visitor to take once they get to your site. In its simplest form, a conversion is an order from an ecommerce web site.

The results are clear. People do click on the ads. The effectiveness of the ad is directly related to it’s placement on the page. This doesn’t refer to the position, but the placement. Some ads are displayed “in column” on the left along with natural search results. These are the best performers, hands down. Other times, the ads are displayed on the right hand side of the screen.

The click thru rate of the right hand side of search engine real estate is lower. Beyond Email frequently conducts workshops on search marketing. During these workshops, we often take polls about which engines people are using and if they click on the right hand side.

Frequently we hear “but I never click over there”. And that’s what we see in the industry statistics as well. People are more likely to click on left side “in column” ads than on the right side. What does this mean to you in your PPC strategy? Pay for 1st or 2nd position.

Every PPC campaign should have a budget. The ads will be delivered in the search engines until the daily budget is reached. In order for the campaign to be effective, the budget needs to be sufficient. An effective ad spend budget usually starts at about $400 per month and goes up from there based on the competitiveness of the industry, geographic target and the number of keywords you are targeting.

If your market is local, your budget can be significantly lower. The Real Cost Of A Low BudgetPutting tight constraints on your PPC budget will decrease the effectiveness of the campaign and can, in fact, render completely miserable results. Consider the following:

◊ Your PPC ads will display until your daily budget is reached. If there is a lot of activity on a phrase, you may run out of your daily budget by 9 AM.This doesn’t give your business exposure long enough to see results.

 ◊ Given a low PPC budget, your campaign will need to be focused on just a few keyword phrases and may only run in one PPC engine. Again, this decreases exposure to the point that no results may be seen.

 ◊ A low PPC budget is very difficult to assess the performance of the campaign due to low click rates.

◊ Don’t pay significantly more for first position, 2ndposition is fine too.

◊ Don’t measure success by clicks: look at conversions.

◊ Don’t consider orders as your only conversion point. Look at all the conversion points on your site. Perhaps even increase the number of actions you consider a conversion.

◊ Don’t use a small budget for a campaign with many keywords and national reach. You’ll need a healthy budget to see results.

◊ Don’t overlook the necessity of reviewing PPC results frequently. A month is a lifetime in a PPC campaign. Your campaign should bereviewed once a day at the very minimum. In an aggressive industry, it should be reviewed and adjusted as often as possible.

◊ Don’t pay for PPC bid management services based on a percentage of your advertising spend. This encourages marketers to spend more of your ad dollars without consideration for effectiveness of the campaign.

◊ Don’t settle for campaign reports being provided to you only when asked. You should receive consistent periodic campaign reporting.

The goal of a Pay per Click strategy is to bring qualified traffic. In PPC it’s not about quantity, it about quality of traffic. Since you are paying for each click that comes to your site, you want traffic that has the high potential of converting to a customer.

For example, if you sell outdoor furniture, you don’t want to attract visitors that are looking for just “furniture”. All that will do is drive up your advertising spend. So you need to make sure your ad qualifies your visitor. Set performance benchmarks up front.

Consider the following:

â—Š Measured by specific keyword phrase Increased revenue per keyword phrase Increased contact us requests or request for quotes Increased newsletter signup requests

â—Š Difficult to measure by specific phraseIncreased phone calls to your offices And increased overall web traffic Tracking Results

PPC campaigns allow enormous trackability. Make sure the mechanisms are in place to track the performance of each keyword phrase. Otherwise, how will you know which ones to eliminate? Review the ROI on each frequently and adjust campaigns according to results.

Do It Yourself?Pay per Click advertising can seem like an easy “do it yourself” strategy. Depending on the competitiveness of your industry, it can be. However, we’ve seen companies lose a lot of money with ineffective PPC strategies that have been self-managed.

A professionally managed PPC strategy can pay for itself with increased conversion rates.