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Internet marketing explained |
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One of the most profound developments in Internet marketing recently is the search engine. This article informs you about types of search engine marketing and provides guidance on how to make the Internet an advanced marketing tool for your business. It also clarifies the often confusing terminology used by online marketing companies and websites.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) |
| There are two main ways to be found in the search engines: organic search results and sponsored search results.
Search engines provide the user with the best possible results on a query, namely finding the most relevant websites. These results are called organic search results. Listings from such searches are not the result of any payments between a company and the search engine. The organic results given on a certain search phrase fluctuate from search engine to search engine depending on the internal algorithm used to classify the importance of websites for certain keywords. There are ways and means to "convince" the search engines that your site is very important for certain key phrases and should be included high in the organic result pages (often referred to as SERP - Search Engine Result Page). The process of raising the position of a website in an organic search is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This process differs depending on the search engine you are targeting.
SEO
Currently the most important search engine for organic search results is Google, managing about 60 percent of worldwide queries. There are two vital steps to achieve high ranking in Google: Optimization of your website / contents and link popularity.
Some of the most important measures that need to be taken in the first step are: 1) making all contents accessible for the search engines 2) keyword prominence (putting your key words in important positions of your website like title tags) 3) establishing an efficient internal link structure and 4) raising the keyword density to 4-8 percent (percentage of keywords within the text of your website).
Besides your contents, link popularity is the other most important factor in optimizing for Google. Creating link popularity is all about getting quality text-links from other websites. In this context the well known reciprocal link programs are loosing their importance as Google values a one-way link to your website much more than a link exchange. Quality links come from sites relevant to your business (real estate related). The inbound link should have your key words in the link text and the website should have a high Page Rank (PR). Page Rank is Google's way of determining the general importance of a website and ranges from 0 (lowest PR) to 10 (highest PR). In simpler terms, it can be explained as the number of total incoming links.
PPC
For companies trying to promote their services in a more classical way, search engines offer sponsored search results that appear separated from the organic results. After defining the key phrases you want your advertisement to appear for, you have to allocate how much money you are willing to pay for each click on your ad. Depending on the amount of competition on your key phrases the cost per click can be very high. The advantages of PPC are total cost control and immediate results. However, people tend to click on organic results (80 percent) more frequently than on the sponsored results. |
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Conclusions for Internet marketing campaigns |
Our advice is to run SEO and PPC in parallel, reaching short and mid-term goals with PPC and long-term goals with SEO. Once a good ranking is achieved via SEO, your PPC efforts can be reduced as from this point on the organic results will generate your leads.
On-line marketing requires thorough investigation, competition analysis, technical expertise and a dedication to following trends in search engine development, but if done right will pay major dividends.
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