Friday, November 14, 2008

Organic "Natural" SEO V/S PPC Advertising

Organic "Natural" Search Engine Optimization Versus Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising

The following are the main points of difference where Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising differs from Organic "Natural" Search Engine Optimization. When visitors or “clicks” are purchase from a search engine, it is called “pay-per-click” (PPC) search engine advertising (or PPCSE). “Organic” or “Natural” search engine optimization (SEO) is accomplished by optimizing web pages and increasing “link popularity” by acquiring or paying for links that point to the web site.

Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising allows to quickly get top search engine placement by “bidding” (paying) for keywords related to the product or service. “Organic” or “Natural” search engine optimization (SEO) gives high rankings at the Search Engines for the chosen search terms. New website visitors delivered to company sites by the organic search results are far more valuable than visitors being delivered from search engine advertisements. Site traffic from the organic search engine referrals tend to be more qualified and in-market, and thereby much more likely to convert, versus the often fickle, skeptical, cost conscious and expensive Pay Per Click search marketing website traffic.

Pay per click advertising gives short term results. Optimizing web pages for natural search engine results involves a lot more work but in the long term, a much better return on investment can be received with natural search engine optimization. Companies or individuals with smaller marketing budgets can complete with larger organizations as the natural results are based on relevancy to the search term rather than the amount one is willing or able to pay for each click through to web site.

Pay Per-Click advertising is needed when immediate results are required. A basic Pay Per Click campaign can be up and running and driving visitors to web site in a matter of hours. Significant improvement in organic rankings may take several months to achieve.

Search Engine Marketing Professional

Meaning Of A Search Engine Marketing Professional

A professional is the one who applies his theoretical knowledge, skills and training to practical. So an SEOP is also expected to do the same ethically.

A search engine optimization professional focuses on optimizing website to attract the attention of search engines and improve rankings. Their specialty areas are "organic" search engine listings - i.e. free. Decision related to the hiring of a SEOP is the most risky one. There are many who can guarantee a top 10 search engine ranking. Believe it or not securing a top 10 ranking is easy but getting viable quantities of targeted traffic is something different.

A search engine optimizer is assumed to know what is good for the client better than the client. It is easy to do what is asked to any one can make money by just doing what the client wants. If a client requests only for changing the Meta tags, and a SEOP doing so is not said to be ethical. He knows that it would not help their site found in the search engines.

A client is not the one who knows the profession how it works. They may read somewhere “zebra (doorway) pages can bring in more traffic. They may put in a proposal to create 10 zebra pages, not wanting the SEOP to touch the actual pages of their site, they just want pages that live on the "fringes" of the site. SEOP should not give the client a quote for this. SEOP knows, zebra pages are found only by the search engines, Once the user arrives at one of the pages from the search engines, they're basically forced to click an extra time to finally arrive at the real site that they wanted to begin with.

When a current site already has tons of great content pages, SEOP should suggest not to add any zebra pages, instead tweak their current content a bit to make sure they're using words that real people use when searching. Or perhaps ensure that the search engines can easily spider through the site and find all that great content.

The bottom line is that SEOP’s job as a professional to do what is ethical. If it means losing a job, then let it be so. One can obviously find a client who can appreciate SEOP’s looking out for their site's long-term well-being.

PPC Advertising and Search Engine Optimization

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is the most dynamic way to advertise on the Internet. It enables you to choose the keywords for which you would like your site to appear on search engines when a search is performed. Pay per click advertising on search engines allows a website to appear in the search results right up there with the market leaders.

In PPC, rankings are calculated for keyword phrases based primarily on the price that is being paid. The advertiser decides how much they are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more they are willing to pay per click and the more popular the advert, the higher the site will appear in the results for the chosen keywords. Advertisers only pay for people who actually visit their site, visitors who are actively searching for their product and are therefore already potential customers.

There are numerous pay per click search engines, two of them worth serious consideration are, Google (Google Adwords) and Yahoo Search Marketing.

All major search engines now use some form of pay-per-click listings, enabling businesses to take advantage of a unique online marketing opportunity.

The reason why pay per click ads are becoming such an attractive option to businesses of all sizes, is that campaign options can be tailored to suit any budget. From large multi-national corporations down to small city-specific vendors – online advertising using PPC can deliver targeted, high quality traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization is definitely a slow way to get your website traffic if you plan on not using PPC traffic. It could be a long, expensive road before you even begin selling your product. Search engines can take months, even years to start pulling up high with the search engines. But, natural search engine traffic is definitely the best long term way to get the majority of your traffic.

When getting your site to start pulling up in SEO natural listings there are 2 main things that need to be done:

1. Add Content
2. Add Backlinks

Search engine traffic requires you to submit your site to many different search engines and wait, maybe even months for them to spider your website.

When starting out, using PPC advertising for testing products and keywords is important, after that spend time optimizing site for search engine traffic.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Working Of Search Engine Robots

Search Engine Robots also called a web crawler (Web spider or Web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms (Kobayashi and Takeda, 2000). They are the seekers of the web pages.
Many legitimate sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Robots are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Robots can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

Search engine robots have only basic functionality they just can't do certain things. Robots don't understand frames, Flash movies, images or JavaScript. They can't enter password protected areas and they can't click all those buttons you have on your website. They can be stopped cold while indexing a dynamically generated URL and slowed to a stop with JavaScript navigation.

The automated robots first check the availability of a robots.txt file while arriving at a website. This file is used to tell robots which areas of the site are off-limits to them. Robots collect links from each page visited, and later follow those links through to other pages. In this way, they essentially follow the links from one page to another. The entire World Wide Web is made up of links, the original idea being that you could follow links from one place to another. This is how robots get around.

When a search engine robot visits a page, it looks at the visible text on the page, the content of the various tags in the page's source code (title tag, meta tags, etc.), and the hyperlinks on the page. From the words and the links that the robot finds, the search engine decides what the page is about. Depending on how the robot is set up through the search engine, the information is indexed and then delivered to the search engine's database.



The information delivered to the databases then becomes part of the search engine and directory ranking process. When the search engine visitor submits query, the search engine digs through the database to give the final listing that is displayed on the results page.

One can see the pages visited by the search engine robots on the site, by looking at the server logs or the results from the log statistics program. Some robots are readily identifiable by their user agent names, like Google's "Googlebot"; others are bit more obscure, like Inktomi's "Slurp".

Site Maps and Hypertext Links

Site Maps And Hypertext Links: "Food" For Search Engine Robots:

Text links have a lot of value for optimal spidering, and site map has importance to help search engine robots reach website's deeper pages.

Search engine robots cannot click a button, submit a form, pull down a menu, or perform any other type of online ‘user interaction’ that might be used by a human visitor. They are able to index the text on a page and click through hypertext links. A navigational text link is added to web pages (often located at the bottom of the page) to enable the search engine robots with another means to click through the links of web pages when it cannot access these other types of navigation.

Search engine robots can't use a JavaScript menu. As robots' mobility on site is vital for the successful indexing of content, one wants to make it as easy as possible for the robots to visit all of the pages. Use of text links at the bottom of the pages, while hardly cutting-edge, is one of the best ways to make sure that the search engine robots can move around on your site. Links to the site's principal pages and a link to the site map page on all the pages in of the site should be included.

A supercharged version of the bottom-of-the-page hypertext links is said to be a site map. The site map provides ‘food’ for a hungry search engine robot. A site map page will at very least have links to all of the major pages on your site. Depending on the size of the site, it may actually link to all of the pages. This means that once the robot gets to the site map page, it can visit every page on the entire site. Having all the site content included in the search engine database is a good thing: One is more likely to come-up in the search engine results when somebody is performing a search related to your topic.

A site map should be added as it helps the visitors and search engine robots as follows:

1. Depending on the size of the site, it may have links to every page. It provides text links to at least the most important pages on the site.
2. Gives a short explanation of each site page, to inform visitors about the website.
3. Gives visitors the information needed when lost in the website, and shows how to reach the page they are looking for
4. Provides a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach the most important pages
5. Provides important keyword phrases in the site map text and hypertext links that help the automated search engine robot understand what the page is about
6. Helps search engine robots find static landing pages that then link to dynamically generated pages they may not otherwise find.

Site map can be made most attractive to the search engine robots and human visitors by including descriptive text along with the page URLs and links. Maximum use of keywords should be made in the text, including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link.

When you make it easy for your visitors to navigate your site, they'll find what they are looking for. When you make it easy to search engine robots to move around on your site, you increase your chances of being favourably listed in their search results. This is possible only through hyperlinks and site maps and so, they are rightly said to be the food for Search engine robots.

Database Search vs. Text Search

Databases store their information neatly organized into fields, such as product name, category, description, price and so on. While databases can set up complex queries to find the search words in all applicable fields, this makes them slower to respond, requires more memory, and is more difficult to program. Text search engines store this information in a single index and can find words in any field for a record. Many high-end search engines can also store field information, so searches can be limited to a specific field as well.

Users are required to type in complex Boolean or SQL (Structured Query Language) commands for searching. Some databases, such as MySQL, are limited to "Or" searches, will return all records which match any of the search terms. Others default to exact phrase matching, so a search for fuzzy slippers would not find slippers, fuzzy. Search logs show clearly that most people will not do anything complicated while searching, they will give up if the search is too hard to use. Full-text search engines offer simple and flexible search options, with most providing an Advanced Search feature for power users.

Database search functions tend to look for exact matches in capitalization and characters. If someone searches for Safire, they won't find records with Safire in them. Many text search engines will automatically match lowercase searches with any text, and will adjust for extended and diacritical characters. Some also allow search administrators to set up synonyms for searching (doctor and physician), and automatically perform stemming (find octopi when searching for octopus).

Many databases are not designed for easy searching. For example in a wine database, it may be difficult to find wines from a certain region, such as the Napa valley of California, because the location is stored in a table far away from the wine names. Some text search engines, such as dtSearch, FAST Data Search, Ultraseek, and Verity K2, provide a rich data set for searching. Databases are optimized to search for exact words and phrases, and they tend to respond very slowly otherwise. So if a searcher wants to find sheepskin or shearling in the same search, databases will tend to do two searches and then merge the results. Full text search engines are designed to store these words in a single index, so they can perform these kinds of searches efficiently and return quickly.

Many database search engines will happily display all results on the same page, whether there are 8 or 8,000 records. Text search engines have a mechanism for dividing up the results and providing navigation from the first page to following pages (and back).

Database search functions sort by size, or price, or date, or the order in which the items were entered in the database. Text search engines sort by relevance, as determined by the number and location of matched words in the result page or record.

‘Organic’ or ‘Natural’ Search Engine Optimization

Organic or Natural search engine offers advertisers the ability for their website to be listed within the top search results of organic search engine listings without having to pay for placement. In organic search engine optimization, a professional search marketing and custom website design company like DDA starts by establishing specific keywords that relate to an advertiser's product.



Once the most effective keywords are chosen, content is developed in relation to those keywords. This makes the pages that are listed on the first page of organic search results the most relevant information a consumer can find on that particular keyword. Consumers recognize the relevancy of the page and then trust the advertiser and are more likely to purchase their product or service.

The following are the benefits of organic SEO:

1. 70% of search engine users report that they visit organic sites on a daily basis.
2. 50% of search engine users choose a search result by scanning the top organic results, according to an eye tracking study.
3. 80% of search engine users report they never click on PPC results.
4. 72.3% of search engine users feel Google’s organic listings are more relevant than their paid results.
5. The overall conversion rate of online advertising paid sites is 3 times less than that of unpaid sites.

The biggest weakness of natural search engine optimisation is the time required to generate links and 'tweak' your web pages and keywords to get those prized high rankings you so desire. For the more competitive keywords, it can literally take 3 months or more to start realizing the benefits of your search engine optimisation campaign. For less competitive keywords, you can see the benefits in just a couple weeks.

As the statistics show, more search engine users are visiting natural search engine listings, it has become more crucial for advertiser's to optimize their website to be listed within the top search results of the major search engines.