Search Engine Marketing - The Basics Ideas

Search Engine Marketing - The Basics Ideas
By Mike Spratt

How to get your website higher up the Google or Yahoo rankings is a relatively new science. Naturally there are lots of fraudsters offering fantastic results for a very minor fee. You can normally recognise these as they offer to submit your website to thousands of different search engines. Since most of us in Ireland (90%) only use Google it should be obvious that these thousand of other search engines are pointless, (if indeed they exist). Ranking high on Google means having your site appear on the first page when a prospect searches for a keyword that is relative to your business. This is called a "natural" search, as oppose to a "paid" search.

Paid search is when you pay Google for one of those little text ad that appear at the side of search results. Paid search is the fastest way to get traffic to your website. You can open a paid search account and have visitors to your site in just a few hours. Once you get it working you can experiment with keywords and get a good understanding of how the system works. But once you stop paying it stops working and there is no long term benefit.

Natural search on the other hand, is slower and does not stop when you stop paying. All you have to do is get Google to believe that your website is interesting. That sounds easy doesn't it? So how do you get a good Natural Search ranking?

The best way to convince Google that your website is interesting is to make it interesting to real users. The more relevant and useful your site content is to users searching on your keywords, the more traffic you will generate to your site and the lower your bounce rate is. You need to have interesting content that is regularly updated. The more traffic you generate, the more popular your content can become, the higher your ranking on Google.

Also Google evaluates your site is by counting the number of links to your site. This is also common sense: once you have interesting content you expect that lots of other sites will link to you.

If you want to drive traffic to your website, you should quickly get a Paid Search campaign working, only then look at Natural Search. These are two planks of any attempt to get a good natural search ranking: Interesting content and lots of inbound links. Both of these require effort and consistency over time.

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