Many business owners today think that people will just find them; this is a partially true statement. Depending on how many people know about your brand will depend on how many people find you. This will also be determined from your effectiveness of normal business interactions; however what if you could get word of mouth business and free search engine traffic for terms that convert in to qualified buyers.
"A Professional SEO is the key to your success on the internet by targeting the right keywords and making sure that your site is found when people are looking for you."
Then what if you could effectively triple your investment with “Paid Per Click Traffic” such as using Google Adwords and other PPC Engines. With the right keywords you can gauge them based upon your conversions and include many other related terms into the mix to get more traffic for sometimes a lower cost. That would be very cool; however most business owners either lack the knowledge or time, resources to tap into the online space. This is where you need to do your homework and find a marketing firm or a talented individual marketer to assist your needs.
What is difference between Paid Advertising vs. Organic Advertising?
The best example of this would be anyone can pay for traffic but not everyone can rank for words specific to your industry without putting some time into it. Normally you rank in a search engine for the organic listings because the search engine feels you have a well put together site and most importantly you are relevant to the searchers query... Both work hand in hand however one is "FREE" and the other is not. Many benefits exist especially for high dollar industries such as the medical, legal, real estate just to name a few.
People can pay top dollar for some of these words but again they must study the daily trends to make sure that they are not just wasting their money. Studies have shown throughout the years that Searchers tend to click more on the organic search results over the paid due to their position on the page as well the searcher normally will only visit the first or second page of results until they refine their search query.
How does one get started?
You need to first find someone you can trust that has the experience you need.
- Get a Site Review (Overall picture of your site)
- Find a Qualified Optimizer that will help develop a SEO Plan
- Execute the SEO Plan (Depending on its Ethics) “Do it Safe”
- Evaluate and Test for effectiveness of SEO Plan
You need an optimizer that can study your business and become part of your marketing efforts to help increase your exposure as well study your traffic trends to improve your conversions. In my eyes SEO is always growing and is more then just getting traffic it’s about helping you sell more products from a website in an ethical manner, meaning using standard practices and following all the terms of services published by the search engines.
What to look for in an internet marketer:
When looking for an internet marketer you should do your homework first, find out more about what that marketer’s reputation is in the industry such as what types of work they have done and for whom. Sometimes the clients choose to be confidential so you may not always find out the clients. Also read their blogs or forum posts for intelligent reading, who knows you may actually get something out of them.
Ethical Marketing Tactics:
I am sure most of you business owners have heard of many ways to get listed on the search engines within 24 hours, as well seen those wonderful emails that spam your inbox daily with guarantees for top placement. I will not name any names for privacy purposes but I always get them as well the phone calls wanting to speak to the marketing director or the business owner.
I do all my SEO myself and most of the time I am upfront with these sales guys as they continue their written out sales pitch telling me that they can get me top ranking for any keyword I want….. “I always say wow that’s magic” the response is Yah we have helped many clients and we can do the same for you……LOL this is where most companies run into problems with these types of calls they show you some great examples of the work and log you into a demo that gets your blood racing.
I will not go into more depth because you can read more about this kind of thing happening all over the web… Just be careful about that kind of service, many business owners have paid the cost of getting their company domains banned and having to fight to get it back or not getting it back depending upon the penalty.
If you are un-sure what they are, I have put a few of the top search engines webmaster guidelines below.
Webmaster Guidelines for Staying in the Search Engines:
Google’s Webmaster Help Center
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
MSN Guidelines for successful indexing
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html
Why is complying with the search engine terms of service important?
That is a very simple answer to that question, if you do not comply you will simply get your site banned or removed from their index…
Quote from Google : “Sites may be blocked from our index because they do not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons a pages may be removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index. Please read our Webmaster Guidelines for more information.”
