Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.
Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a "per-click" basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.
Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site - or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive - decreases dramatically.
Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.
The search marketing company Fortune Interactive conducted a study in which they wanted to find out what factors influence web site rankings on the three major search engines.
This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.
Internet directories have become very popular because they are an easy way to get inbound links to your web site. There's an easy way to submit your web site quickly to as many Internet directories as possible.
While studying the creatives of competitors throughout my years in the paid search industry, as any self-respecting SEM should, too often have I witnessed the same thing: It seems as though countless search engine advertisers use the same title and description to appear for all of their keywords. Of course that makes my job considerably easier. However this never ceases to leave me more surprised than a person trying to find a half-decent slice of pizza in Connecticut for two reasons. Firstly, when applied to a generous search advertising budget, this practice of lumping a massive amount of keywords together with a limited number of creatives basically translates into non-converting clicks that number in the thousands of wasted ad-dollars. Secondly, creatives that do not appropriately match the keywords they represent often fail to interest visitors who would otherwise visit the site.
When people think of search engine optimization, they immediately think of time consuming very tedious tasks that are way beyond their capabilities. That might be true if they put no time and effort into it. I do agree that improving search engine rankings in competitive niche markets require a good deal of knowledge and expertise. It's TIME to learn the basics of how to improve your search engine rankings. There is huge need for search engine optimization experts, but most websites don't find themselves in a very competitive niche market. Many websites can achieve top rankings by applying my optimization basics. All you have to do is put in the time learning and applying them.
Most SEO campaigns fall flat on their faces and totally fail to achieve the objectives they were set out to accomplish.
Sadly the list of failures is not just limited to individuals who attempt to carry out their own SEO campaigns. It includes companies and so-called experts who are paid to carry out an SEO campaign for a client and end up totally failing to achieve what they set out to do.
Here are the three most common reasons for failure. By studying and understanding them a webmaster can start their next SEO campaign with better odds because they already understand some of the things that commonly tend to go wrong.
As an SEM Specialist, I must understand the different algorithms search engines use in their work. I also need to have an understanding of how my client's target audience searches these engines.
Analytical tools and their test results offer the most valuable information about visitors searching and browsing behavior. The resulting traffic changes and most frequent keyword phrases that appear in these web analytics reports are the Site Catalyst of any SEO campaign.
This helps one understand the information retrieval algorithms and heuristics process that takes place when search engines qualify a web page for a particular keyword phrase. That is why in order for a web page to be considered relevant, its content organization must accommodate a wide variety of direct and semi-direct search behavior, which is mostly disclosed by its own metrics, in a given time period.
As the number of websites grow everyday, it is becoming increasingly difficult for a new site to attain good rankings on search engines. Since major search engines factor link popularity heavily into their ranking algorithms, building relevant links to your site is perhaps the single most important component of search engine optimization.
For a new site with no or few inbound links, buying text links on more established related sites could provide a boost to your link popularity. But this strategy could prove prohibitively expensive, especially in a highly competitive market where you'd have to buy lots of links to catch up with the competition.