Studies show that the vast majority of all web users arrive at any particular website through the use of a search engine. That being said, the interworkings of search engines are very complex and busy business people can have difficulty finding the time to get up to speed on how to use search engines to their advantage. The purpose of this article is to give an executive summary of how search engines operate and how to get a website to appear in search results.
How does Pay Per Click work?
Paid advertising on search engines is pretty strait forward. You bid a given amount for a search phrase. When someone searches for that phrase in the search engine that you are advertising on your ad is displayed. If a user clicks on your listing to visit your website, you pay the search engine your bid price. Often one can set up a campaign and start seeing results in less than a day. Google and Yahoo have excellent budgeting tools that allow the advertiser to closely control their budget. Results (web traffic, leads, or sales) can easily be tied to your spending which makes the bean-counters in all of us happy.
How do you run a Pay Per Click campaign?
- Set up an advertising account with Google or Yahoo.
- Craft a list of desired search phrases and ad copy to be displayed.
- Determine a workable testing budget, and start bidding based on that budget.
- Watch the campaign results and make adjustments as necessary.
How are natural results chosen?
Search engines maintain their own proprietary formula for determining the order that natural search results are displayed. The exact formulas are very closely held secrets, however there are a two factors that experts agree the engines utilize in their formulas:
A) Website Content
The most important thing in getting a website to appear early in search engine results is to have quality content about the given search phrase on the website. Content quality can be determined by volume, age, the search engine's ease in reading the content into it's database, format, organization, etc. It's as simple as this...if you want to have your website to show up when users search for the term "frogs", you better have a lot of good information on your site about frogs. Search engines make money by selling adverting space. The more people find what they are looking for using a given search engine, the more they will use that engine and the more advertising the search engine can sell. Therefore if you want the search engine to choose your site to come up for "frogs" then you need to put yourself in the user's shoes and make sure that your site is the site they would want to find when they search for "frogs".
B) External links to your site
One of the best ways for search engines to determine (in an automated format) the quality level of your content is to see how many other websites are linking to yours. All other things being the same, if your frog website has 2 websites linking to it and your competitor's site has 200 websites linking to it, your competitor's site will come up before yours.
How do you get your site to rank higher in natural search engine results?
Ah that's the rub isn't it? The process of working to get a website to rank higher in natural results is know as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Unlike PPC, an SEO campaign is a long-term process that can take a long time to gain traction and is difficult to track spending to traffic/leads/sales. Of course, the upside is that you are not paying for traffic on an individual visitor basis. That alone usually makes it a worthwhile effort. Due to the secrecy of search engine placement formulas there are a dizzying array of opinions about how an SEO campaign should be run. That being said, at the most basic level there are two things that all successful SEO campaigns should have in common:
A) Website Content
Seeing that search engines place a premium on quality content, then part of any SEO campaign should be to provide quality content. This work could include-
- rebuilding the site so it is easier for search engines to read (using more text and less images/flash animation)
- adding fresh content with search phrases strategically placed
- setting up a schedule to constantly add new quality content (blogs can be excellent way to achieve this)
B) External links to your site
Seeing that it is agreed that search engines rate the quality of your content by the quality and number of websites that link to your site, it makes sense that a thorough SEO campaign would include an effort to recruit inbound links. There are a number of different ways to go about this which could include, valid participation on other website's blogs/forums, press releases, offline marketing campaigns, participation in community based (Web 2.0) websites, etc.
SEM Diagram
Most successful SEM campaigns will utilize both the PPC and SEO model. I need to mention that this article is just the tip of the iceberg. It would be easy for me to develop each sentence in this article into another article. I have greatly simplified many concepts here so keep that in mind before you start running too fast with that newly sharpened pair of scissors. Please contact us if you have any questions or you would like to discuss what it might entail to have BP manage your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign.
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May 18 2008
