Search engine optimisation
Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, has been portrayed by many Internet industry professionals as something of a black art - and for a very good reason.
Until a few years ago, getting your site to the top of the search engine charts was a complex business, requiring careful use of keywords, hidden indexes (meta tags) and cross-linking with other sites both inside and outside of your given industry. The process of understanding effective SEO is both lengthy and tedious, requiring a lot of in-depth knowledge of how the Internet functions.
Alternatively, however, you can pay for your site(s) to be placed high up on the search engines of MSN, Yahoo and Google. On all the search engines that count, you can pay for a 'per-click' rate to be placed at the top of the results page for any given search phrase.
MSN's search engine calls them 'featured sites,' whilst Yahoo calls them 'sponsored matches,' and Google, the brand leader, calls them `AdWords' but the bottom line is that you can pay to be above everyone else in the search engine stakes. You pay for a number of clicks, then when they run out or credits, your site falls back into the Internet soup with all the others, trying to get noticed in the listings below.
The good news is that it is not as expensive as you might think. Admittedly, if you want to use the phrase 'cheap flights' you are in for a bit of a shock, but for less popular phrases you pay just a few pence per click.
If you are in a niche market, say emu breeding, you'll only need to part with ten pounds or so a month for a phrase like 'emu husbandry' to drive quality traffic to your site.
What about quantity? Forget it. If visitors pour into your site but do not buy your products or services, it's the online equivalent of getting your leaflets distributed to the wrong customers. Quantity site visits is the domain of the SEO cowboys out there, who promise the earth and deliver everything - including humungous volumes of site visitors - who then fail to buy anything.
Using pay-per-click advertising on Google also gives you access to one of the greatest free services on the Internet - Google Analytics. Using this service involves adding a small amount of code to your main Web pages (known as landing pages in search engine parlance) and letting Google's servers analyse where your traffic is coming from, how long it stays on your pages, and from which page it leaves.
Interpreting this information well (Google provides free tutorials) will give you an insight into the effectiveness of your Web marketing, as well as pointers as to which pages/advertising are the more
effective.
Pay-per-click is also better for search engine users, now that the Web is getting so crowded. With so many smaller e-commerce sites now online, whose owners use every trick in the SEO book to get hits from the main search engineers, it's almost impossible to find relevant sites.
With pay-per-click, you get fully trackable and auditable results, and can rest assured that only those customers who are pro-actively interested in what product or service you're offering will end up visiting your site - as well as previous customers, of course.
Nestling alongside Google Analytics in the free service stakes is Just Search, which has just launched a free online tool that enables Web masters and marketing managers to instantly compare their Web sites search performance against competitors.
Just Search's site comparison tool has been optimised for Google and analyses two Web sites against key natural search criteria - Google Page Rank, site saturation, backlinks and directory placement. The free utility displays the results in a unique radar diagram that displays the site's natural search performance visually, providing an indication of how much work is needed for a poorly performing site
to out-perform its competitor.
Of course, Just Search would like it if you upgraded to its pay-for services, but as a free service, like Google Analytics, the basic service takes a lot of beating.
Relevent Guides:
Online advertising
Search Engine Optimisation
Designing a Web site
Web site linking
By Steve Gold, News Editor
