ranking in search engines: PPC and SEO

The job of a search engine is to display a list of relevant websites depending on the words you search for (keyphrases). They do this in 2 ways.

One way is to present a list of websites that it calculates is relevant using a list of pre-determined rules. These are called organic listings and appear on the main body of the page. The more relevant the organic listings, the more people will continue to use that search engine. Nobody pays for these rankings, but many people try to figure out the ranking criteria and manipulate them.

The other way is to allow advertisers to pay for their websites to appear against specific keyphrases on a “per click” basis. This is how they make money to fund the greedy shareholders ongoing development of their organic listings.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimsation

Search engines use more than 100 factors to work out which websites are the most relevant each time a search is made. Some are more relevant than others, but among the most important factors are:

• how many other websites link back to yours
• what are these linking websites about
• what words do they use in their links
• what words do you have on your website (and in which order)
• what are your pages called (titles and page names)
• what pictures do you have on your website (defined by alt text)
• how old is your website
• how regularly updated is your website
• what websites do you link to

Trying to manipulate search engines is dangerous, Search engines will look for patterns like websites suddenly getting lots of new links from rubbish websites or you creating your own network of poor quality websites for the purpose of internal linking.

and so a solid approach to SEO is to make sure your website is

• relevant to your desired keyphrases
• regularly updated
• remarkable enough for other people to link back to it

Build a great website, care for it, then go out and talk about it on the internet (facebook, twitter, forums, blogs) and you can’t go far wrong.

Advantages:

• You do not pay for individual clicks, so no sneaky competitors
• Organic search listings are more likely to get clicked than PPC search listings

Disadvantages:

• It can take months (years) to get rankings for competitive keyphrases
• It’s harder to target lots of different keyphrases
• You have no control over your positioning
• You can’t react and change your targeting very quickly if your keyphrases aren’t working out for you

PPC stands for Pay Per Click.

This literally means you pay the search engines each time they send a visitor through to your website.

Of course, you only want relevant visitors, so you give the search engines a list of keyphrases (i.e. search terms) relevant to your website.

Your advert (link) will only show up each time one of these specified keyphrases is typed in. You don’t pay each time your advert is shown, you only pay once it is clicked on and a visitor is sent to your website.

You specify the maximum amount that you are willing to pay for each one of these clicks, and then continue to receive these clicks (visits) until your budget is depleted.

The more you pay, the higher up the listings you appear.

Advantages

• You can start getting visits to your website in 5 minutes
• You choose which keyphrases and ranking position you appear in (as long as you can afford it)
• You can make changes to your keyphrases, bids and websites until you find a profitable combination.
• You can target an unlimited number of keyphrases

Disadvantages

• You never stop paying for the visits
• As more competitors join in, the prices go up
• You cannot stop competitors / time wasters clicking on your ads (Search engines do a pretty good job at minimising this)

Summary

The best internet strategies combine both PPC and SEO. Use PPC heavily in the early stages to find out which keyphrases are the most successful before you embark on a long campaign of SEO. PPC accelerates your understanding of how to improve your site and who to target in the early days to maximise your efforts and strategy for the future.

PPC providers include Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Serach and Microsoft Adcenter