A lot of people ask me what is better for their business, pay per click sponsored links or SEO. This is an area where it really depends on your business and your budget.
For those of you who dont know pay per click ads work like this: everyone enters bids on how much they are willing to bid for certain keywords. The person with the top bid is in the first slot and the next highest bid gets the next spot ect. The person with the top bid doesnt actually spend how much their bid is, they only pay a few cents more than the next highest bid. Whenever someone searches a keyword you are bidding on they will see a link to your site in the sponsored bids section. Whenever someone clicks on that link you get charged. This can become very expensive because it is open ended. You can set limits per day or only deposit limited funds into your account if you want but as soon as you hit your limit or your account runs out you are removed from the sponsored links. Also, sponsored links tend to get less traffic, usually about 10-20% of what the sites in the natural results get. Why No one can say exactly why but there have been studies done and they have all shown that people tend to skip the sponsored links or use them last if they cant find what they want in the natural results.
Pay per click adveritising does have its advantages. If you need results tomorrow then this is definitely the way to go. PPC can be a lot more flexible and is good for companies that have an off season. PPC is what it is. A quick solution. Traffic now. If thats what you need then its the way to go.
On Thursday Ill go in to the pros and cons for hiring an SEO company. As always thank you for taking the time to read my post and if you have any questions feel free to send me an e-mail.
Jeffrey Henderson
Director of Marketing
ViP Search Engine Marketing
I am the Director of Marketing for a professional SEO firm in Burbank, CA. I am relatively new to writing articles but I really wanted to de-bunk a lot of the myths out there about SEO and to help people understand what SEO really is. I hope that you, the reader, benefits from these articles and if you have any questions feel free to contact me.
Theres been much fuss lately as to the need for Search Engine Optimization of the right kind; some will tell you that to be effective SEO has to be organic; others will swear by the power of using the right software, coincidentally, their software. Then there are those who say that if you find the right niche market, the world will beat a path to your door and leave their money when they get there. I even spoke with a fellow yesterday who claimed that if you only launched new sites when the moon was full... well, thats a whole other story.
Where there is less conjecture is in the dire consequences possible as a result of using the wrong kind of optimization. Horror stories abound of the million dollar investments that have simply gone down the drain when Google and the rest decided that the optimizers had cheated in their enthusiastic rush for the top. The early techniques of getting a website to the top of the search engine results (link farms, cross linking, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, and all the rest) have slowly been made ineffectual by the steadily rising sophistication of the search engine administrators,(and the algorithms they employ to keep the race fair and assure relevant search results).
So what is good SEO
We could, perhaps, define SEO by function; we could talk about the actions which bring about the optimization. First theres research, hour upon hour of research must be performed for each account. With such items as industry research (whats the competition up to), keyword research (how big is the market for this product/service), competition research (how many others are already vying for this market), marketing research (who else has already done this before and what did they discover that I better know about too) Many hours, days, and sometimes weeks can be spent getting a clear visualization of a plan before the actual project can ever begin.
To even start a website without the proper research is a guarantee that:
We could approach the question of SEO from the perspective of form. Every site is constructed differently, designed differently, laid out differently, has a unique way with which it interacts with visitors, and targets those visitors differently. These are all factors that are considered during the research performed prior to laying out a raison dtre for optimization. Architect Louis Sullivan, argued that a buildings purpose should determine its design, stating emphatically that Form follows function. Shortly after, his student, Frank Lloyd Wright argued, Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. Although Sullivan and Wright were speaking of architecture as it relates to concrete and steel buildings, theres an architecture which goes into the design of a website that, when done well, echoes Wrights observation very nicely.
Good SEO will see to the writing or rewriting of the content on each page to effectively work in all targeted keyword phrases. A professional web-copywriter will be able to take the SEO recommendations for keyword usage and incorporate them into existing content in a way that reads naturally (i.e. does not look like you jammed keywords here and there) and has the ability to convert your visitors into paying customers. This is no small order and if it is not performed well, the site will remain just another pretty page that nobody ever sees. Or, worse yet, your site will attract lots of visitors but they will become confused by the copy and fly off to the next site without ever taking the desired actions (sign up, buy, make contact).
Another function of SEO, and one not often spoken of, is cleaning up all extraneous code on the pages. Code bloat removal, as its so poetically referred to, is an art form in itself. It requires a thorough understanding of html along with all the rest of the coding and scripting languages which make up a modern web page, as well as the ability to move it to a separate file and importing it, when feasible, or trimming it to its bare essentials without changing the look and/or function of the page itself. Eliminating page code bloat can be an incredibly arduous task. Moving styles and JavaScripts is only part of the puzzle. Many times, a page has to be almost completely rebuilt due to the excess amount of junk code that gets added in with the use of popular WYSIWYG page editing software.
To see what a search engine spider bot sees when it visits a web page, go to the View button on your browser toolbar. Move your cursor down to Source (PageSource in Mozilla Firefox), and left click. What you are looking at is what Backrub (Google), Sidewinder (Infoseek), T-Rex (Lycos), Gulliver (Northern Lights), and all the others look at when they spider a site. They read it the same way you do, from top to bottom. Notice how much code and formatting are at the top of the page and scroll down to find the content (this article). Taking all of the code and paring it down to just whats needed and then finding ways to trim that is part of what good SEO is about. Try this on other sites you visit and you will soon understand the situation.
OK, time out! I tried not to mention specific software in this article but, hey! Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesnt use FrontPage to create pages on Microsoft.com even the pages that deal with the FrontPage software Perhaps, theyre trying to tell us something. Ive spent literally months of my life removing and rewriting the loopy code and nonessential tags that have been produced by FrontPage editors. From an optimization standpoint using FrontPage to produce a website is akin to shooting yourself in both feet before you start to run a marathon. If Microsoft doesnt use it, why should you
Now that thats out of the way . . .
After the code bloat removal process, good SEO will address getting all pages on the site to validate to the professional standards set by the W3C. Validation is simply a process of ensuring that the right coding elements are used and used correctly. This isnt a good guy - bad guy question or even a matter of not breaking the rules, its about being accessible to everyone who uses the web. There is a growing number of the blind and visually impaired who use Voice Readers or text-to-speech software which speak the text on the web page. Many of the old tricks and shortcuts that web designers used in the past dont work with these or any of the growing number of other software designed to make a level playing field of the Internet. While many validation issues are not a big problem in and of themselves, if you find it on one page, it will likely run all through the site (and can take many hours of head scratching and work to clean up affectively).
META what
Everyone has heard about meta tags, alt and title tags, and making them all search engine-friendly, but there are few sites that actually use them to full advantage. Theres so much already written that I hate to add to the plethora of information, (real and misinformation) on the subject, but I will say that the purpose of the alt tag is to provide an alternative to a graphic and not, as widely believed, to go on and on about what a superior product you have or how wonderful your business is.<img alt=picture of DoDo bird> Nuff said!
There are varying opinions about what should and shouldnt be included in a title tag. What is agreed upon is that all of the major search engines give the content of the title tag significant weight in determining what the page is all about. Its my practice to only write a title after everything else on the page has been written, and then with an eye to using at least two (better 3) of the keyword phrases that apply to the page. Unless youre GE or Maxwell House, or intend to spend the kind of money they spent getting to be a well known brand, there is simply no reason to place your company name in the title tag. Save it for the terms that people will use to find your services/products. I know, you wanted mama to see your company name right up there in the Title Bar. Its ok with me, but it will cost you.
We Dont Need No Stinking Map
Site maps help both search engines and visitors quickly and easily get to the information that is important. Its amazing how simple a matter the design and implementation of a usable site map is, and how many websites either dont have one, or have an incomplete or obscure site map - an even worse scenario. If youre not sure you need one, build one anyway. Trust me on this one. If I come to your site and cant find what Im looking for, Ill look for a site map. If I cant find a site map, Ill look somewhere else. Oh yeah, thats how 95% of website visitors are. Get a site map.
The robots.txt file is useful to communicate with the search engine spiders about content they should or should not index. This allows the bot to focus its time on the good stuff and not the irrelevant portions of your site.
Good SEO is all of these things and more. Your site will be off to a great start by following the suggestions mentioned here. And hopefully, this article will get you thinking that just maybe those seo firms which offer Complete SEO $100. or Get Your Site To #1 In Google $295, arent talking about the same things that weve been discussing here. After years in the business, Ive yet to give even a ballpark figure for an optimization campaign without thoroughly researching the needs of the client, the structure of the site, and the competition for the target keywords. Every situation is different. Be wary of anyone offering a la carte SEO; without research, an individualized plan of attack, and careful implementation, you might as well wait for the next full moon.
James Doc Lewis spends much of his professional time as SEO for Emerald Coast Entrepreneur a . Doc started practicing his search engine majic long before the term SEO was coined. Introduced by a friend, at the University of California at Berkeley, to the Usenet some time in 1982, when the idea of a world wide network was just starting to make a buz, he quickly realized that this was what he had been looking for. I havent been without a computer and a way to get connected since. Doc was on the design team of the graphical user interface (GUI) for Veronica, the second database of web documents, and forerunner of our modern search engines, a topic to which he gives constant study and receives numerous requests for consultation from around the world. To find out more about Doc and his unique style of SEM/SEO check him out at ECE,
Copyright 2005 Emerald Coast Entrepreneur