Search Engine Optimization vs. Pay Per Click = Buying vs. Renting

One of the best analogies to compare SEO versus PPC advertising is to consider the decision of buying versus renting a home.  If someone were to ask you if it is better to buy or rent a home, what would you tell them?  Hopefully you would tell them that it depends, right?  What does it depend upon?  Well, the price of course!  In the following exercise, it is very important to understand how to compare the prices of each option.

While many people would say that it is always better to buy than rent if you can, this is not always the case.  For example, lets say you have the option of buying a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in a nice neighborhood for $250,000.  Is this a good deal?  Maybe its a great deal, but what if I told you I would rent it to you for only $100/month?  How can you go wrong?  You can see where even though we were taught it is always better to buy, there are situations where renting is better if it is cheap enough.  The biggest caveat to renting is the risk of the price going up in the future.

Comparing PPC versus SEO is a very similar exercise.  PPC advertising and SEO optimization both get you essentially the same thing, the use of valuable internet real estate.  The higher up you are on the pages you desire, the more valuable the turf!  When evaluating between these two core internet marketing strategies you need to take into account the cost of each.  This is going to depend on a number of important factors, including the keyword phrases you are targeting, the demographics you are targeting, and especially your geo-targeting.  Some industries like plastic surgery, weight loss, and internet marketing are extremely competitive, while others like awnings, aluminum products, and related are often not as difficult or expensive.  Nationwide campaigns are often more competitive than local ones, though not always.  Location plays a major factor.

The math to determine the better strategy between SEO and PPC is quite simple.  Similar to the cost of living in a home, either rent or mortgage payments are made monthly for the right to live in the home.  Lets break down the cost of PPC vs SEO in the same manner.  We need to determine the number of times your PPC ad is clicked per month, the cost per click, and the total monthly cost.  We then need to compare this number with the cost of getting your website ranked organically, or even receiving traffic from web 2.0 marketing techniques, to determine a fair comparison.  You can see the comparison is a little more complicated than saying PPC is better or SEO is always the best.

Any reputable internet marketing company should be able to provide some guidance for you in this SEO vs. PPC comparison exercise.  A good way to find one is to make sure you include the term “best” in your search query.  For example, you may want to try a search along the lines of “Best Internet Marketing Company” or something similar including the term “Best”.

As an owner of a internet business, Your ultimate goal is to get your website to the first page of Google. It is imperative that you know how to divert traffic to your website. People have realized the potential of internet as the powerful medium for marketing. Using the right resources for internet marketing is a vital strategy to attract visitors.

Building back links is an important step in search engine optimization. When you gain quality links to your website, search engines give more importance to your site. This enables the site to come up in the search results. Posting articles in various sites, directory listing, social book marking, forum posting etc are some of the major link building strategies.

You must consider several factors while acquiring back links. It is true that more inbound links increases the possibility of the site to top in the search engine results pages. But search engines give more importance to the quality of the links as well.

Many companies offer link building services at a cheap rate and provide low quality services to the clients. They acquire links from the link farms that search engines hate the most. Such malpractices are enough to bring your site down in the search engine results pages.

Black hat techniques employed in link building will be easily detected by the search engines. They will penalize your site and even drop it from their index. Amateurs in the field of SEO use black hat tricks to gain customers quickly.

Always try to acquire one way links from reputed sites. A single quality link is valuable than hundreds of low quality links. Look for those high quality web sites for building links. Check the page rank of the site, the number of inbound links and the age of the domain before you put the link. White hat seo link building services are the only way to get your website to the first page of Google. To find a link building service that will give you the type of links you need to reach front page of google you need to ask questions, ask for references, check references take your time this may be one of the most important decisions you can make about your website and its growth. Finding the right link building service may not always be the lowest cost to you, but you usually get what you pay for.

Link building strategies change with time based on the changes in the algorithms of search engines. Link exchange, a practice which was widely followed before, is found to be of little use now.

When you place the links, the anchor text must be related to your targeted keywords. Creating links with texts like “Click Here” or “Purchase Now” etc has less importance. Topical relevance of the anchor text is another important factor while building links. For example, if your site is about computers, it does not make sense to acquire links from a site based on skin care. The theme of the web sites must be related in some way.

Finding the right web site is also important. Efficient and experienced link building service providers use advanced techniques to find out such sites. They know various deep linking techniques, link wheel creation and other ethical or white hat SEO techniques to improve the rankings of the website.

Outsourcing the work to a good link building service provider allows you to focus more on your core competency. But finding the right link building service is critical if you want to achieve your goal of reaching the first page of Google.

Remember to ask questions, check references, ask what type of links they will place and follow up spot check on them to make sure they are doing the type of links you requested.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a subset of internet marketing, which uses a combination of free and paid techniques to ensure the achievement of the client’s objectives. The central idea behind any search engine marketing campaign is to ensure a high ranking for a website in search engine result pages. The need for Search Engine marketing arose because users wanted faster results.

Organic SEO techniques are time consuming and results usually take many months or weeks to show up. Clients who want instant results often resort to search engine-marketing campaigns, which include sponsored listings, pay per click campaigns and similar such paid techniques to obtain high ranking on search engines.

Sponsored listings are a sure shot way of achieving high ranks on search engines. Depending on the kind of money, a customer is ready to pay; search engines alter the ranks of companies in search results for certain defined keywords. Another way to achieve high ranking on search engines is to bid for certain keywords in search engines . Most search engines allow users to customize their ad campaigns in line with their advertizing and marketing budgets. By bidding for certain keywords, users can improve their rankings in search engine result pages. However, this method can prove to be quite expensive, as users need to increase the bids if their ranking does not improve in search engines.

Other paid methods of improving your website’s ranking are CPM and CPC. Cost per (thousand) Impression (CPM) technique enables users to pay for their advertisements only when the page has been rendered at least a thousand times on the browser of each unique visitor. A customer’s account is debited only after thousand impressions have been rendered. Such methods are however prone to fraud and require proper management through web analytical software’s.

Cost per Click campaigns on the other hand require user s to pay for each validated click made by web surfers. Users can set the lower and upper limits for the payments they are going to make to their advertisers on a daily basis. If users want, they can choose to pay for only those visitors who end up filling an online query form. This method will ensure that they end up paying for only genuine queries. However, this method is also vulnerable to fraud and requires web analytical software’s for effective management and execution.

Search Engine marketing has become immensely popular as it provides a measurable method for advertisers to evaluate the return on their advertising spend. Other mediums like print, TV, radio, although effective, do not possess the capability to inform advertisers about the direction of their marketing spend.

The field of search engine optimization is always changing. What works one year for SEO may not work the next year at all, and if it does it may be substantially less effective. That’s why it is so crucial to continually evaluate your current SEO tactics to see what remains valid, effective and efficient. Considering this, the question is if link building has officially emerged as the most important factor in ranking highly within the search engines.

Link Building for Page Rank

Page Rank is the official term for the reputation and credibility that your website receives from the Google algorithms. The other major search engines such as Bing and Yahoo! have similar ranking methods, although neither is as prominent or ubiquitous as Page Rank is from Google.

Your website’s Page Rank is entirely derived from the quantity and quality of incoming links that lead to your web pages. The higher your site’s Page Rank, the higher you will generally appear in the displayed results. Therefore, link building has become one of the hottest topics in the field of search engine optimization over the last several years.

All Link Building is not equal

While link building is a great strategy to boost your site’s reputation and therefore your standing in the search engines, it must be noted that not all links are equal. The black hat techniques of link farms no longer hold any weight, and even the tried and true link exchanges that so many websites participate in have been devalued.

Additionally, techniques such as blog commenting and forum posting no longer play a large role in your website’s Page Rank. The best links that you can receive for your website are unsolicited one-way links from highly reputable sites within your industry or niche.

Multiple Strategies are still essential

Although link building has emerged as one of the most essential factors for SEO, it is not the only factor that holds any weight. Effective keyword inclusion, the age and makeup of your domain, your website’s internal linking structure and more are all still important in terms of how highly you rank in the results of search engines.

Therefore it’s crucial that you continue to combine many different strategies to produce the best results. Additionally, never forget that all links are not created equally, and that high quality inbound links will be infinitely more effective than low grade, or black hat links.

If you are an online entrepreneur and is currently trying hard to gain a better search engine ranking like Google? If so, you must read on.

If you are in the SEO world, then you may know how important backlink is for your website. You may also know how the search engine traffic beneficial to your website or your business if you get the link building works right. At the same time, I am sure that you also realize how difficult in getting a quality backlink in this century.

Most of the search engines today are not working in accordance to a developed algorithm for more than a certain period of time, they are keep changing the algorithm just to prevent the increasing amount of link spam. If you have also developed some methods or tactics in getting ton of backlinks that might worked in the past, it might not work again in a couple of weeks later. You will also see your site search ranking declining from day to day just because that you are not following the search engine trend.

You may ask why? This is mainly due to the number of quality backlinks that you are getting from that ton of backlinks, ask yourself, how many of them are quality backlinks or how many having high authority to catch the search engine attention? Quantity in today SEO world is just don’t work as compare to quality, 3 quality backlinks may be able to compete with 100 of low quality backlinks in getting the same result for your search position.

Building quality backlinks is not that hard, try to focus on any sites that is having certain authority from search engine, these can be political blogs, government related sites, health related niches and so on. Keep in mind also, a quality backlink that is relevant to your niche play a vital role in your search result ranking. If you are focusing on blog commenting link building, then try to look for relevant blogs with doFollow attribute, if you are focusing on directory link building, then look for relevant doFollow directories.

There are also famous link building techniques called profile link building, where you are able to get one way doFollow backlinks from authority high PR sites at very affordable cost. This strategy is famous where some researches and success stories show that this method is successfully improving the search engine ranking dramatically. There are also some link building companies providing this type of service with low cost, and this method is highly welcomed by the webmaster with limited budget but looking for long term result.

George Brown’s Google Sniper product launched on October 15 of 2009, and has been achieving a high volume of sales since its release.  It provides a start-to-finish system for creating websites to make money online.  Though this is not a Google Sniper review, I would like to cover a point that the system does not provide its readers with, and explain how you can plug this gap.

The foundation of Google Sniper involves picking low competition keywords, creating highly themed content with excellent on-page optimization, and pre-selling your visitors with a review or story.  As mentioned in my Google Sniper review, George goes into a great deal of detail on each of these topics.  However, the system revolves around the assumption that your chosen keyword’s level of competition is low enough that you will rank naturally without engaging in any link building.

As anyone with any experience in internet marketing can tell you, choosing keywords that accurately is not easy to do.  Often, a Google Sniper site made by a newbie will land on the second or third page of Google, which rarely sees enough traffic to get any sales.

So how do we fix this problem?

The easiest solution to this issue is to simply build links pointing to your site.  However, due to George’s aversion to link building, he only discusses this on a cursory level in Google Sniper.  As such, adopters of the system may have difficulty finding ideas for building links, so I’ve included a brief primer here.

1. Social Bookmarking:  George covers this well in Google Sniper.  It is worth noting that most bookmarks do not pass page rank due to the no-follow tag.

2. Link Wheels:  This is the process of creating blog posts on various Web 2.0 properties such as Blogger, Weebly, Vox, etc. with links pointing back to your site.  They are made into a “wheel” of link juice by linking each property to the next, until finally linking the last property to the first.

3. Profile Links:  Many high page rank sites allow users to create personal profiles on their site, and often include an area where you can place a link.  MTV.com and TED.com are good examples of this type of site.

4. Blog Commenting:  This involves seeking out relevant blogs and posting a comment, using your keywords for your name and placing the page you want to link back to in the URL field.  It is important when doing this to actually read the blog post and make an intelligent, relevant comment, otherwise the comment will most likely be deleted.

5. Article Submission:  Write high-quality articles and submit them to reputable article directories.  These directories will allow you to include a resource box at the end of the article where you can link back to your site.  In addition to providing you with a powerful link, article directories will often help you to generate additional traffic as they usually rank quite well in the search engines.

With the 5 techniques above, you should be able to boost your Google rankings significantly, even on competitive keywords.  With this knowledge, you’ve now filled the only major gap in the Google Sniper system, and you’re ready to take the internet by storm.  Get to building those sniper sites and get your slice of the pie!

You might need to design web color schemes for your blog or estore. Since people from all over the world can view your site, it has to have mass appeal.

There are some websites with great content that get passed by just because they aren’t easy on the eyes. Here is how to have a unique but pleasing color palette online.

Step 1: Use Neutrals. There are so many fantastic colors out there that it’s tempting to use all of your favorites at once. This can have a blinding effect & will distract from your content. Make sure that the eye has lots of white, black or tan space to rest on.

Step 2: Look in your closet. You may feel intimidated & think that you aren’t a web designer. You match colors everytime you get dressed. Think of the process you go through when picking out an outfit. You probably have a pop of color & then pair it with a black skirt or denim jeans.

Step 3: Pull colors out of photos. You can easily match the color to your photo just by using the basic MSpaint program. Just open up your photo in paint & use the pick color tool that looks like an eyedropper. Just click it on whatever color in the photo you want & it should appear in your paint palette.

Step 4: Make links stand out. Users should easily be able to identify links in your content. You can do this by making them a separate color or by having your links be bold or underlined.

Step 5: Use an online color scheme generator like the one at the end of this article. These are beneficial because they give you the exact html color code. You can also change the scheme from complimentary to monochromatic for a completely different look.

With the vast amount of information about search engine optimization available on internet, one tends to get confused on what strategy should be applied in order to optimize a website. Here I am going to talk about how to promote website with different strategies that most SEO Consultants apply in their packages. I will tell you 6 best SEO strategies that will cover most of the website optimization methods you should know.

1. Web Directory Submission:

Web directory submission is one of the easiest way to get permanent one way back links for your website. You can easily search a list of top web directories in Google or Wikipedia that have page rank 3 or more. Submitting your website to higher page ranked web directories will give your website improved appearance in search engine page results. Kindly note that you do not submit your website to a huge collection of web directories at the same time making your submission look like spam. Consider quality submission by submitting your website to top 100 directories. Search engines certainly look for the quality and not the quantity of the back links your website gets.

2. Article Submission:

Many people believe article submission is a very tedious job. This is because not everyone has the ability to write meaningful articles. But in my opinion article submission is a very consistent way of optimizing your website. Search engine crawlers simply delight in crawling through some of the top article directories. All you have to do is take some time out and write an appropriate article parallel to your website category and submit them to article directories. Even if you do not approach any other methods described here but this, your website will still have better chances to appear on top of the search engine result pages.

3. Social Bookmarking:

The primary reason why search engines are attached to social bookmarking websites is because all the entries in social bookmarking websites are done by humans. The second reason is because social bookmarking websites are updated in real time. Search engine crawlers often crawl through these websites for real time updates. Few of the social networking sites have also started real time search facility, e.g. Twitter, Facebook and Propeller. Moreover, these websites have millions of users registered. By bookmarking your website here, your website gets round the globe exposure. You can also build a group of your interest and promote your website for free.

4. Pay Per Click:

Pay Per Click, commonly referred to as PPC is an advertising model where you advertise your website and pay only when someone clicks on your advertisement. Google AdWords is one of the most popular PPC service provider. If you are a beginner, all you have to do is to register for Google AdWords campaign, build an advertisement and set your monthly budget. You will be charged only when your ad gets clicked. There are many other PPC service providers who charge on monthly basis, e.g. Anoox. You have to pay a flat monthly fee for a specific keyword, no matter how many times it gets viewed or clicked. However, the advertising network varies with one another.

5. eMail Marketing:

Email marketing is a sure way to catch up to your buying customers. Users subscribe to your email subscription only because they are interested in your product or service. For this reason your website must have email subscription option. You can sign up for Feedburner or many other free email subscription services. They create a feed for your website and whenever your website is updated, they automatically send an email to your subscribers letting them know about the updates.

6. News Letters:

Growing business websites must issue news letters regularly. There are many customers who are interested in a field of your business but are not interested to buy products you are currently selling. But they may be interested in future for other products you may sell. So keeping such customers updated about your new products with news letters is very crucial. You can buy low-cost news letter software to send out weekly or monthly news letters. Most of the software providers give an option to try their software free for 1 month.

You can practice first 3 methods completely free for your website promotion. The other 3 methods require some investment. You just have to manage a budget to optimize your website and make an action plan to carry out all 6 strategies mentioned here. By following these strategies you can get your website on top of the search results and generate a huge traffic.

One of my partner-in-crimes in internet marketing came by the house the other day and asked me how to improve his search engine rankings. I told her to hire an SEO company to help her improve their site. Of course, she was considering the cost and benefits of hiring an SEO company, and asked me more questions in the process. I ended up giving away my search engine optimization secrets to her; that got me thinking about sharing my secrets here since I already give it away anyway. So here goes nothing: the key to successful search engine optimization would be diligence, diligence, and diligence.

The first diligence will get you started. You must put your efforts into producing an enjoyable site with a lot of quality contents for a certain topics. You need to carefully pick your keywords and integrate them seamlessly to your site. Overstuffing keyword to every bit you can find is definitely not the way to go. You need to patiently create and gather quality contents with proper keyword placements to be able to reach success in search engine optimization in the first place. Without diligence, you will surely be rushing to ad-cramped page with unnecessary use of keywords all over the place; this will push your visitors away and will not get you anywhere. Search engine optimization is a form of internet marketing, and the goal of any marketing would be to earn revenues. Having visitors leaving your site as soon as they arrive will not get you the kind of revenue you want.

Next, you need to be diligent in building links and trackbacks. There are various ways of doing this. You can use social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter to your advantages. You can also use social bookmarking to gradually increase the flow of visitors to your site. Of course, having good page ranked sites linking to your site will help the purpose substantially. Again, you need to be diligent because link building cannot be done overnight. You need to gradually increase the amount of traffic coming to your site by having valuable other sites linking to your site instead of rushing everything and render the process useless. I still found SEO company who promise a large amount of backlinks within a short amount of time; do you really believe they will have quality sites linking to you that way? This is unethical link building, and it will surely do more harm than good to your site.

Last, you must be diligent enough to wait for results. Search engine optimization needs some time to take effects because search engines do not constantly crawls your site. You need to wait to see some changes instead of jumping to conclusion right away and start doing more modifications to your site. By giving your site enough time, you will be able to sort out which of your strategies are working.

Again, if you feel all of these steps are too much to handle by yourself, take my advice and find a good SEO company to help you with the process. SEO company will provide you with services that will be well worth your money.

Effective search engine marketing tools are essential to today’s online marketer…

Its obvious to most web users, marketer’s alike, that to ensure your success online, one need’s to improve upon ones web presence i.e. get yourself noticed, improve upon your site visibility. And, you need to do so, in a much more effective, efficient, and productive manner, as competition is much more prevalent these days. Yet, of course, we should still remain within the bounds of good quality, and great content too.

In fact, your immediate and 3 major online goals to success should be something like;

Visibility – ensuring that the search engines can find you
Traffic – get more qualified, convertible visitors to your website
Presence – continually improve on your website exposure

All things being equal, if you can master, or improve, these three items, it should equate to your online success.

But “You can’t do the job, without the tools”…as they always say

For most of us, cost is an important factor in obtaining useful, tangible search engine marketing tools, especially at the onset of your marketing campaign, when you are still on a tight budget.

In fact, I have personally spent numerous, countless hours looking for effective search engine marketing tools, ones that can truly do the job, or perform as prescribed, and still remain within my personal budget, or, that are freely available.

If, you are in a similar situation as me, then fear not, hope is not lost, as there are numerous options. In fact, heaps of Search Engine Marketing Tools are available, we just need to look around, and, think out of the box..! If you always do what you’ve always done…you will always get what you’ve always got..!

So for search engine marketing, great niche, or keyword research tools, even high PR backlinks! Then Google’s very own backyard is probably one of the best, and easiest of places to find some truly useful, and, free search engine marketing tools.

Remember; If you want to catch a fish…think like a fish, not, a fisherman…Thinking like your customers, can only benefit you…so use what your customers are using “Google”

Another famous quote springs to mind “Judge a man by his questions, not his answers”- Voltaire….so what are your potential customer’s questions? What are they actually searching for?

Google Search Box is used daily by almost everyone online…but, what about;

“Query Suggestions” go to Google preferences and click on “Provide query suggestions in the search box” this will provide you with some really useful and relevant suggestions when doing your initial research.

Then there is “Advanced Search” great for not only finding niches, new markets, but some really cool sites, with high page rank, excellent for commenting, and, building backlinks. Want to learn how to use “Advanced Search” then check out ‘Google web search help” “search basics” and “more search help”

Of course, everyone knows and loves the “Google Keyword Tool” but what about;

Google Trends – helps you to see what people are currently interested in

Google Insights – find out even more info on what people are searching for

And not forgetting Google Labs too…

To help improve your own website visibility, then why not use;

Google Webmaster Tools – a one stop shop FULL of webmaster resources to help get your site optimized and indexed

Some other free and fantastic Google search engine marketing tools are;

iGoogle – a great starting point, where you can centralize, or aggregate all the Google search engine marketing tools, gadgets, widgets, and resources.

Google Bookmarks – save all your favorite sites, and attach keyword rich labels, and annotations, even though its now a “no follow’ attribute, yet it’s still a worthy asset.

Google Profiles – seldom used, but truly effective, is your own Gmail profile, you can create some great “do follow” backlinks from your Google Profile to your own site, what could be better..?

Goggle Knol – get some web authority, create, and collaborate upon, then, publish credible web content at Google Knol.

Google News can help announce your online presence with a impressive Press Release.

Google Base can finally help with your ROI generating you some great sales by promoting all your products & services.

And lastly don’t forget all those valuable “do follow” backlinks that your getting from Google’s own Search Engine Marketing Tools.

What next…is there life after Google…what do I do now..?

What other search engine marketing tools are available?

Well; I find that submitting my website to web directories is a great way to increase my web presence, improve search engine ranking, pagerank, and get quality one way backlinks too.

Social Bookmarking is another great asset, especially; if you insert your keywords into the tags, this can, not only improve your web presence, but provide a steady stream of traffic to your site.

What about article writing such as this…article submissions is another great way to create awareness about your self, or your site, more traffic streams, and helping to establish authority too.

Finally a little tip…why not collect all your fresh new web content, URL’s, including, social bookmarks, tags, RSS feeds, any relevant web 2.0 properties, twitter posts you may have, and Ping them all..! This will send ALL the search engines running to come and check out your new web content, and help push you up, into those top search engine rankings for your chosen SEO keywords!

So; All in all…just by reading this one article I’m confident it has given you some fresh, new ideas on how to market your products, more effectively, and really improve your search engine rankings.

Don’t give up, it’s not easy to penetrate today’s online markets, I know, and I truly sympathize with you…but always remember; tomorrow’s battle is won during today’s practice…

Search Engine Marketing Tools are truly the keys to your success.