Why Web Design Is Important
Web design is an important part of doing business online. In the old days, if you had a website it was enough. People were not expecting attractiveness. But today, an ugly website won’t do. Your website needs to have a pretty face.
Your first impression as a business will often be your website. If it looks cluttered and unorganized then people will have that impression of your business and you will lose sales. It is vitally important to focus your web design efforts on three key areas of first impression:
- Attractiveness of design
- Search engine optimization
- User functionality
If you ask which of these is more important, the answer is none of them. They are all equally important. Your web design should be attractiveness enough to keep people interested long enough to read the content. The content needs to search engine optimized so that it attracts the right people through search engine marketing channels. And it needs to be functional and easy to use for your visitors. Miss the mark on any of these and you’ll lose sales. But it all starts with a pretty web design.
Why Strict Keyword Densities Are No Longer Necessary
To truly understand how SEO works today you need to have an understanding of the history of SEO as a marketing strategy. Search engine optimization did not develop in a vacuum and it won’t evolve into what it will be tomorrow without the developments that are occurring today. There is a continuum and it can be traced.
To begin with, SEO did not really get its name until after Google came on the scene. Before Google, Internet marketers were optimizing their websites but they didn’t really call it that. However, that “optimization” was very primitive compared to how it’s done today.
Meta Tags, Backlinks And The Rise Of Google
At one time, pre-Google, all you had to do was add a bunch of keywords to your meta tag list and you’d rank well for those keywords. It didn’t even matter if those keywords appeared in your page content or not. You’d still rank. Hardly seems fair, does it? That’s why Google rose to such prominence as quickly as it did. The company introduced a whole new paradigm.
When Google came along, no one was interested in analyzing back links. Today, that seems intuitive, but at one time no thought it was important except for two guys with the software to make it happen.
Those two guys started Google, whose search ranking algorithm was based largely on the number of inbound links pointing to a particular web page. Soon, Internet marketers started dropping their meta tag strategy in lieu of a backlink strategy. Back links became the new currency.
From Backlinks To Semantic Natural Language
Over the years, Google has tweaked its ranking factors to include more than just an analysis of the number of inbound links to your site’s pages. Quality of links, relevancy of links and link diversity are important too. And there are more than 100 other factors Google considers as well. And then there are Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask and many other search engines. Each one has their own ranking criteria.
One consideration that the major search engines look for today is natural language, or semantic language, syntax. While keywords are still important, successful web page do not need X number of one keyword phrase per Y number of words on the page, what marketers call “keyword density”. Instead, it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the right places on your page and in proximity to other important elements on the page. And to write naturally for your site visitors just as you would if keywords were not important.
In essence, the search engines are looking for the best content for every keyword phrase they rank pages for. If you stuff your pages with keywords just for a ranking then you are doing yourself and your site visitors a disservice. It’s basically shooting yourself in the foot. Trust me, that hurts.
On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
The Best Reputation Management Tool On The Planet
There are reputation management tools and then there are reputation management tools. The best tools for managing your reputation online are more than just reputation management tools. They are tools that can also – and should also – be used for other things.
For instance, a good reputation management tool will also optimize your website for search engines for the key terms that are important to your website as well as the key reputation term that you are managing. It is a branding tool, and SEO tool and a reputation tool all rolled into one.
So what tool is that?
Your blog. And this is what your blog does in each of those areas using normal, every day tactics that the search engines approve:
- Adds fresh daily content to your website – This alone takes care of all three of your goals: Branding, Reputation Management and SEO. Your blog is a unique branding tool, but it also can be used to SEO your website around your key terms. Every key term that is important to your marketing efforts can be taken care of through your blog. Then there’s reputation management. If you write your blog yourself and sign your name to every post, that’s a big reputation plus. Even if you hire a ghostwriter, you can have blog posts signed as they are a reflection of you and your values.
- Link building and internal navigation – Yes, this is also a three-time bread winner. Your anchor text not only acts as an SEO element for your website, but it also is great for branding. And links that include your key reputation terms perform an added boost as well.
- Increases your chances of being found – Every blog post is counted as a unique web page so the more often you blog the more often you brand and SEO your website and manage your reputation.
- Gets your website crawled more often – If your website is crawled more often then the search engines will update their indexes more often to rank your important pages for your key terms, key reputation terms and, of course, that makes you more brandable.
So, as you can see, your blog makes your website more brandable, increases your SEO and adds a reputation management element that other SEO and branding tools do not. It’s the perfect reputation management tool.
Is SEO Getting Harder?
Search engine optimization seems to be getting harder and harder. Is it, or is it just my imagination?
In the early days of the Web, all you really had to do to rank a website is choose a good domain name and add the right keywords to your meta tags. You could have hundreds of keywords in your list of meta tags, even some that weren’t on your web page, and you’d rank for the key terms you wanted to rank for. Not today.
The search engines have become so much more sophisticated. And so have search engine optimizers. And there is more competition going after every keyword. It’s not easier. It’s harder.
So how can a new webmaster seeking to get his website recognized earn the rank that he desires? The first thing to do is to study a little bit about SEO. Learn what you can. If you have a business to run then you likely won’t learn everything, but you can learn enough to be able to discuss valid tactics with a real professional. Learn enough that you won’t be taken advantage of. The life of your website depends on it.
Should You SEO Your Site For Facebook?
According to WebProNews, Facebook and Microsoft are extending their relationship, which will be a big boost to Bing’s search share. Or Facebook’s search share. However you want to slice it.
This is obviously good news for Bing since Facebook is one of the Web’s most trafficked websites – more so even than Bing itself. To get the exclusive on the search feature of Facebook should do wonders for the search engine’s search share. But what will it do for website owners?
I think it could mean that search engine optimization for Bing will become even more important. It’s already important though not quite as important as SEO for Google. But I can see that this relationship with Facebook could make it just as important to optimize for Bing as for Google. That is especially true if Facebook manages to overtake Google as the No. 1 most trafficked website online.
But here’s the catch: Optimizing your web pages for Bing won’t be any different than optimizing them for Bing right now. It will just be more important.
Why PPC Is A Good Place To Start
If you have a new website that you are trying to promote and believe that a targeted SEO or social media campaign is going to help you reach your desired ROI sooner then you are in for a disappointment. It’s not search engine optimization and social media campaigns don’t have value. They do. But they usually take a while before the value starts to show.
With an SEO campaign, it really depends on the competitive playing field. But if the competition is average then you are likely to wait a year before a hard-hitting SEO campaign really starts to pay off. You might get some results within that first year, but it takes a while before you achieve respectable rankings for competitive keywords. In some industries that one year becomes two or three.
With social media, it might not take that long or it might take longer. There are a lot of variable factors that can influence the success of your marketing campaigns. One of those is your choice of social media platforms. If you show up at the wrong place then you’ll find the wrong party. Plain and simple.
With PPC you have a lot more control over the outcome than you do with social media and you can achieve much quicker results than you can with SEO. The biggest problem for many advertisers is budget. But if you can get a handle on that, running a PPC campaign right out of the starting gate should get you a quicker ROI. Are you in a hurry?
How Phrase-Based Indexing Influences SEO
If you’ve never heard the term “phrase-based indexing” then let me give you a quick primer. The concept is based on clustering. Google’s search bot will go out and analyze pages that use certain phrases together. For instance, “baseball” and “home run”. Add to that the key phrases “base hit” and “strike out” and you’ll start to get a picture.
If a large percentage of pages on the Web that discuss baseball also use the other key phrases in the cluster then you have a high value set of phrases. Google can use this information for several purposes.
One purpose is to identify phrases that are popular among spammers. If the search engine can identify those then the spam can be filtered from the search results. But another purpose is to use the phrase clusters themselves for ranking purposes. A web page that successfully incorporates the cluster of phrases into its content could rank higher for the initial key phrase – “baseball” for instance – than a web page that simply re-uses the initial key phrases over and over again attempting to achieve the right density.
This is particularly telling because what it is really saying is that natural language writing is preferable to stilted keyword-based writing. The search engines have been treating content this way for several years. Understanding this will improve your SEO.
Do Article Spinners Work?
There is a new practice in article marketing using SEO tactics on the cheap. It’s called article spinning. The practice is simply taking an old article and putting it through a computer software program that mixes it up and changes the sentences around so search engines don’t recognize it as duplicate content. The problem is, it is duplicate content and usually the articles don’t make a whole lot of sense.
For instance, the article spinner will take a sentence from the third paragraph and make it the opening paragraph. It might even exchange a keyword for another pre-selected keyword. Then it will take a sentence from the bottom of the article and make it the second sentence while moving the first sentence of the original article to the third sentence spot and thus forming a new paragraph.
The article spinner rearranges the entire article this way. And marketers actually use them.
I’m not going to say that the articles are poorly SEOd. By bot standards, the SEO isn’t bad. But the writing is usually horrendous. I don’t know how people make money with these articles, but some do.
It’s almost always better to use original articles. Original content in any format is always best. The search engine optimization will almost always be better, but the writing, which is always for humans any way, will nearly always be a big step up. And your reputation will go along with it.
Will SEO Ever Die?
Veteran folk rocker Neil Young sang a popular song in the 1970s and 1980s that went something like this:
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll will never die
Later, King Missile made a hit with a song titled “Rock and Roll Will Never Die.” The message has become a clarion call for rock musicians who want the romantic dream to live forever.
SEO is no romantic dream (and some would argue neither is rock and roll), but you could apply this message to it just as well. SEO is a marketing tactic for online businesses that involves writing your web content in such a way that search engines rank that content against other web pages for specific keywords. If you do it well then you rank high. Bottom line.
The reason SEO will live forever is because search engines rely on content. Searchers thrive on it. Robots feed on it. Webmasters provide it. If you provide what human searchers need and what search engine robots feed on then you’ll always be in business. SEO is a necessary tool for doing business online.
2010 Search Engine Optimization Goals
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. Have you established any search engine optimization goals for this year?
It might seem like an academic exercise to establish goals for SEO, but it’s really not. If you want your search engine optimization efforts to be successful then you’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to work your plan. That requires setting some goals.
The first step to successful goal setting is to analyze where you are now. What got you here? Have you been tracking your progress?
Some of the important SEO metrics to keep an eye on include:
- Search engine saturation
- Number of inbound links
- Keyword rankings
- Page rankings per keyword
- PageRank
- Traffic count (visitors, unique visitors, etc.)
- Bounce rate
These are not the only metrics that are important, of course, but it’s a good start. Figure out where you stand right now then chart a course for where you want to be by year’s end. Goalsetting is not a difficult task, but it is an essential one – even for search engine optimization.
Why SEO Is Still Important
You might think, with all the talk of social media, real-time, and video/viral marketing, that SEO is not as important as it used to be. Don’t be fooled. It’s still as important as ever and, if anything, is more important than it ever was.
There are two things more than anything else that influence the importance of SEO – increased competition and search engine policies.
Regarding competition, there’s not a lot you can do other than try to out-optimize your competition. That requires some competitive intelligence, but it also requires some aggressive search engine marketing and keyword research. You need to know what people are searching for and how you can meet the demand for information better than the other guys. That’s a bit of a no-brainer.
The tough one is search engine policies. They change, and they can change drastically. Sometimes without much notice. But they rarely change in ways that are unforeseen and illogical.
For instance, in the past couple of years we’ve seen the search engines go from offering 10 blue links of organic results to offering a handful of organic links along with images, video results, and listings from other verticals. Savvy web marketers should have seen that coming. The rise of the verticals almost ensured that would happen. And people demanding better search results all around was a huge factor as well. Plus, it just makes sense. People searching for information on a given topic may not necessarily be looking for a website – they could be looking for a video or an image.
So, search engines change. And that means SEO can sometimes change. But, again, it rarely changes in ways that can’t be unforeseen or that are totally illogical. Just because your friends are going social doesn’t mean that SEO isn’t still necessary. It is – now more than ever.
Is PPC A Substitute For SEO?
Pay per click advertising has its place. A good business with a good marketing plan can use PPC to do great things. But is it a substitute for SEO? Absolutely not.
First, you need to realize that 80% of all clicks from a search engine to a website are clicks on an organic search listing. So even if you manage a great PPC campaign you can expect to only get 20% of your clicks from PPC. That doesn’t mean you should just forget about it, however.
Still, PPC is not a substitute for SEO and it never will be. It should augment your SEO campaigns. You can target the same keywords in both your PPC campaigns and your SEO campaigns. In fact, you should. But at the end of the day, they are two different marketing tools and they are used for two different purposes – to reach two sets of the same market. You need both.
What’s The Point To Reputation Management?
You’ve heard the term “reputation management” used, but what does it mean? Why should you focus on it? What’s the point? Is it just another SEO tool?
Well, yes, it is an SEO tool, but the point behind reputation management is more than just SEO. It might be truer to say that SEO is a tool to enhance your reputation management efforts.
The point behind reputation management is to increase the positive image building elements about you and your brand that appear online while degrading the negative as much as possible. You do this through the use of several tools, including SEO. But you can – and should – also use social media to assist you with your reputation management. In fact, SEO and social media go hand in hand to help you with managing your reputation.
But there are other things too. Social connections, for instance. Get your biggest fans to help you. If you can get your fans to evangelize on your behalf then your reputation management plan becomes easier to manage.
It’s easy to lose sight of the goal and start focusing on driving down the bad talk or to get fixated on your awards or other trophies, but don’t get sidetracked. Your real goal is to brand yourself and make a positive impression on the people you want to do business with. Reputation management is largely just being yourself. And I know you can handle that.
Video SEO: Did It Just Get Better?
Bing has announced a more enhanced video search platform and from what I can tell, it’s not bad.
While I don’t think this is a sweeping innovation by any stretch, I do give Bing kudos for making some changes this year that makes it more competitive – even if slightly – in the search market. While I don’t expect Bing Video Search to come anywhere near YouTube, Hulu, or Facebook in terms of volume of videos watched, I do see that Bing Video could capture some of the video search market from Google and Yahoo!
But not much.
The one advantage that Bing Video offers is organization. But the real question will be in SEO. Will Bing offer any SEO advantage to webmasters who use video? If so then you can expect Bing Video to be a major player in the SEO game. That’s possible, but is it likely? Only time will tell. I’m rooting for Bing on this one. We could use more video optimization opportunities.
Stop The SEO Myths, Do What Makes Sense
Sometimes the SEO world folds in upon itself and starts doing weird stuff. Such a thing happened just recently when Matt Cutts made an offhand remark about Archive.org. Michael Martinez sums it up pretty well.
If you read his blog post and come to the conclusion that you should NOT block Archive.org because you don’t want to be accused of being a spammer then let’s go back to school. Matt Cutts wasn’t sending a signal that anyone who blocks Archive.org is a spammer. On the other hand, simply blocking Archive.org isn’t going to solve all your problems either.
Clearly, whether you block Archive.org or not is a decision you have to make for yourself. There are legitimate reasons for doing so. Spammers – some spammers – do it, but they do it for a different reason.
When it comes to SEO, don’t follow the crowd. Don’t listen to the myths and turn them into religion. Just do what makes sense.
The Surest Way To Protect Your Reputation Online
There is never a fool proof way to do anything. No matter what you try, in reputation management as well as in SEO or anything else, there is always a way to fail. But there is one way to ensure that you manage your reputation online well and that you at least give it a full faith effort to remain spotless. That one method is to provide excellent customer service.
While good customer service can’t ensure that no one will ever accuse you falsely or take a legitimate claim public unnecessarily, it will reduce the chances drastically. After all, happy customers have no reason to complain.
You can perform all the SEO tricks in the world, be diligent in how you present your web pages to social media sites, and consistently pound away at search engine listings until you get them all. But none of it is a good substitute for great service. Provide great service and people will talk about you. Provide a lousy service and they’ll talk but no amount of SEO will undo the damage. Good reputation management means never having to clean up a mess in the first place.
Two Branches Of SEO
There are two branches of SEO that every website owner should be familiar with. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Your on-page SEO consists of keyword management, meta tags, alt tags, navigation, and other elements that exist on your page to help you produce effective SEO for your website. Off-page SEO consists of anything you do off of your website, such as building links, that produces SEO benefits.
One of the best things you can do off page is to list your website in directories. Many webmasters don’t know it, but you can submit your internal web pages to deep link directories and build links to those internal pages.
Neither on-page SEO or off-page SEO is more important. On-page SEO, of course, must come first. And it should really be your focus in the early days of website development. But after your website is built you’ll need to focus on link building and off-page SEO.
Do Low Quality Back Links Affect SEO?
One of the most common worries among new webmasters is whether or not low quality back links will adversely affect their SEO or web rankings. Generally, no. But you have to take each case on its own merits.
Webmasters, most of the time, cannot control who links to them or why. That’s not your problem as webmaster. But if you are concerned about a particular back link or group of back links you can write to the website owner and request that your link be removed. Most webmasters will oblige, but if you run into a situation where you are refused then you might have other options. The search engines, however, will not help you in that situation.
Back links are generally good for webmasters, but they are only one factor that affect rankings. There are plenty more. Still, some links won’t benefit you at all. If a website has a reputation as being spammy, chances are links from that site won’t go to benefit you. But they won’t hurt you either. And that’s the beauty of low quality back links. It’s best not to worry about them.
Are Backlinks As Important As On-Page SEO?
The argument continues – are backlinks more important or is on-page SEO more important? There is a growing number of SEO professionals who believe that backlinks are the holy grail of SEO. But most of us still chant that content is king. Which is it?
Personally, I think backlinks aren’t important at all until you have some on-page SEO working in your favor. What’s the point to building links to a page with no content? Even if you succeed in boosting that page’s rankings, visitors to the page will be disappointed to find nothing there. But a well optimized web page that answers a question for a lot of people within a particular niche is a gem, with or without backlinks.
Don’t get me wrong. You’d be a fool to build a web page today with no link building plan. But I’m simply illustrating the importance of quality on-page SEO. That’s the starting point. Everything else, from there, is upward mobility.
Use Page Anchors To Better Your SERP Listings
Google has announced that page anchors can now appear in the SERPs for specific pages, however, Google decides which pages based on its algorithm functions. This is a great opportunity or SEOs.
First, let me say that page anchors have always been useful from a user experience point of view. Got a page with multiple sections in it? Add a table of contents at the top and link to each section with an anchor. A user looking for specific information can find it just by scanning the table of contents and going right to where they need to go on the page. Now, however, you can do it for SEO reasons.
Of course, it will be a few weeks for SEOs to start blogging about what they did to manipulate the rankings using page anchors, but it’s coming. You should plan on using keywords in your anchors, however. Is that a given?
Are SEO And Reputation Management The Same?
There can often be a confusion of terms in search engine marketing. Many people seem to think reputation management and SEO are one in the same. They’re really not. While reputation management does often involve search engine optimization, SEO is not necessarily reputation management.
Here’s what I mean:
Your online reputation is an aggregation of all the things that you and other people say about your online. Good and bad. Many times, comments made by and about you are search engine optimized and rise in the rankings. When they do more people will see them. But someone can say something about you – again, good or bad – and not use SEO techniques, which will likely just land those comments in a vacuum.
By the same token, just because you’ve SEOd your website and caused it to rise to the most prominent positions in the search results doesn’t mean that you’ve done an adequate reputation management job. If you target the keyword “blue widget”, for example, because that’s what you sell, then you are not necessarily affecting your reputation by ranking well for that key term. Someone searching for “blue widget” will find your website if you rank high enough, but they may not know you from Adam. On the other hand, if they search for you by name they may not find your “blue widget” page.
So you can see, SEO and reputation management are not the same. They are both necessary, but the approach for tackling each is different. Treat them that way.
Does Your Pay Per Click Inform Your SEO?
One of the best and most effective SEO strategies involves using PPC, or pay per click advertising, to find new keywords and optimize web pages. It really isn’t anything new. Webmasters have been using pay per click to inform their SEO for many years. It works like this.
You pick a few keyword phrases that you haven’t targeted on your website just yet and bid on those. Write your ads. Point the URLs in your ads to the most relevant page on your website. See which ads get clicked on the most for the keywords that you are targeting. When you find a keyword that attracts a lot of click throughs then you know you’ve found a good keyword for your niche.
But what should you do with that keyword? Well, you can build a new static web page for your website or your can write a blog post. You can also write articles for your article marketing efforts. Whatever you can do in the way of content development that requires keyword optimization. And it starts with a simple pay per click campaign.
Competitive Intelligence In An Online World
Last week we talked about competitive intelligence in a corporate world. It’s an important part of any business whether online or offline. Competitive intelligence is also important when it comes to marketing. In an online world that competitive intelligence extends to search engine placement as well as online marketing.
How does competitive intelligence relate to search engine placement? SEO or search engine optimization is the process of gaining the best possible place on the search results pages for any search involving your keywords.
The key part of competitive intelligence is the gathering of facts that relate to your competitors. Some of the information gathered includes:
- Keywords and keyphrases
- Inbound links
- Associated websites
- Partnerships
- Social marketing tactics
The gathering of facts is, however, only one part of competitive intelligence. The most important part is knowing how to filter that data, what to do with the filtered data and finally how to compare it against your own site(s).
Just because a competitor uses a set of keywords doesn’t mean you should as well. In fact, your competitive advantage may be the fact you do use a different set of keywords.
In that situation, your concern should be how to protect your advantage since competitive intelligence is a two way street – yes, they could well be researching you. Whilst worrying how to get ahead of the rest, don’t forget to stay in front of those behind you.
Can SMO Substitute SEO?
Can social media optimization (SMO) be a fitting substitute for search engine optimization (SEO)? To answer this question it helps to have a working understanding of both SEO and SMO. Let’s examine:
- SEO – The purpose for SEO is to attract visitors to your website based on search engine queries such that you answer their questions simply by delivering quality content that meets their needs.
- SMO – Social media optimization is the social counterpart to SEO. It doesn’t replace it, but compliments it. SMO allows you to attract new visitors by appealing to your audience’s social needs while grabbing their attention with valid SEO techniques.
It’s important to note that the best SMO relies on sound SEO. Your social media efforts will be enhanced if you start with SEO as the basis of your website building block and use it as your foundation. Let SMO rest on the foundation, not vice versa.
What Is Search Engine Marketing?
Search engine marketing is generally broken into two different types of marketing. On the one side is search engine optimization. On the other side is pay per click advertising, or paid search. The primary component of search engine marketing, of course, is the practice of increasing the visibility of a website in the search engines. That could technically include more than SEO and PPC.
Many industry insiders think of SEM as primarily paid search advertising, or contextual advertising. I think there could be a case that SEM includes social media advertising in some cases.
If the intent of advertising is to influence search rankings then I’d argue that should be included in the broad definition of search engine marketing. In that case, buying links – though frowned upon by search engines – could be considered a part of search engine marketing.
However you define search engine marketing, there is one thing that all marketers online can agree on. You can’t build a web business today without it. Search engine marketing is as essential to business today as sunlight.
Is On-Page SEO More Important Than Link Building?
I was discussing link building today with a friend and we both agreed that link building is important. But neither one of us were willing to say it was the most important thing. You can build all the links you want to a poorly optimized website and you likely won’t get too far. But we’ve all seen the results of the Google Bomb, right? The problem is, one algorithm change and those bombs blow.
But on-page optimization is fairly constant. If you stick the basics – good content, clean code, fast load times, light on the images, proper keyword management, internal navigation – then your website should do well. Inbound links can never serve as a substitute for poor on-page optimization.
However, if you have a well optimized website with all the right design and content elements then a good link building campaign can enhance it tremendously. Link building should be seen as a supporting activity for good on-page SEO. It shouldn’t be a primary optimization tactic.
The Most Overlooked SEO Secret Known To Man
Many times, clients ask us if they have to pay for ranking for keywords that they weren’t targeting. The answer is no.
Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.
Every website will inevitably rank for certain keywords and phrases that weren’t being targeted. It’s a part of the natural order of the Web. Some of those keywords will actually prove to be beneficial for you.
It’s nearly impossible to predict what people will search for. Google has said that a 20%-25% of its search queries are brand new searches that have never been seen before. That effectively means that you’ll see a certain number of queries in your server log delivering traffic to your site in unexpected ways. That’s the power of the long tail.
If you can target long tail searches over a long course then you can penny and nickel your way into top search rankings one long tail search at a time. Eventually, if you win enough of the long tail phrases, you’ll start to rank for the general search phrases in your niche as well. And you’ll see loads of traffic coming to your site just because you were persistent enough to pursue the long-tail strategy.
Search Engine Marketing Is More Holistic Than PPC
There’s more to search engine marketing than merely a full force pay-per-click campaign. We strongly believe that search engine marketing should be a comprehensive and holistic marketing endeavor involving various methods of marketing online. Pay per click is just one method, albeit an important one.
The advantage to using pay per click marketing in your search engine marketing plan is that you have more control over your budget and your message. You can also drive targeted traffic to your website much more quickly with PPC than you can other methods. But I’d never use PPC as the only marketing method online.
Natural SEO is still very important and you want your natural SEO efforts to compliment your PPC efforts, and vice-versa. But you might also incorporate other methods of marketing into your search marketing plan.
Usually, companies don’t think of social media marketing as a part of SEM. But it can be. If you engage your prospects in such a way that it affects your SEO and overall SEM efforts then it can be an integral part of your overall search engine marketing strategy. The key is to keep it all consistent.
How You Are Judged In PPC
Many would-be Internet marketers are a little confused about pay-per-click marketing. It is assumed that because it is keyword-based like SEO then the rules are the same. That’s actually not the case.
With search engine optimization, you are judged by how well your website is optimized by both on-page and off-page factors. You are judged by things that are both in your control and outside of your control. With PPC, you are judged entirely by things that are within your control. However, your placement on the page is judged by things outside of your control.
Let me explain.
A good PPC campaign begins with a list of keywords. You first have to build a landing page that is optimized for your keywords. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them. Next, you write an ad that is designed to drive traffic to that landing page. You set a budget and bid on keywords and let your ad go live. The search engine will give your ad a quality score. That quality score is based on how well your ad and landing page work together AND whether or not visitors to your landing page stick around – your bounce rate.
You might say, wait a minute, I can’t control what my visitors do. But before you say that, consider that your visitors are reacting to your copywriting skills. If they leave your site because it is poorly designed or doesn’t meet their expectations then it’s because of what you did. You have control over that.
But even if you do everything right and you get the best quality score, your placement within the search engines is dependent upon the search engines. You may be placed high on the list due to your quality score, but if someone else achieves a higher quality score, which you can’t control, then they may actually achieve a better positioning than you.
So your ad is judged by what you do, but your placement is judged by a combination of what you do and what your competition do. Those are some things to keep in mind when planning your next PPC campaign.