Online Sales The Organic Way Making Search Engine Front Page A Real Possibility
Ok, so you have a website that wows] your friends, but do you have a website that wows your clients? In fact, are you drawing the visitors to your website that you truly need to ensure it is profitable? Sadly, most website owners fail to get the payback on their Online Marketing spend that is practical and a high Search Engine Placement is a thing they are very unlikely to achieve. Today we’ll analyse a typical search results page and discuss how, with the assistance of a search engine optimization company, you could reap the greatest reward from your Online Marketing investment.
If you use Google (which many people do) you’ll probably be familiar with the look of their results page. You enter say, “search engine optimization company” and you’ll get two sets of results returned. Down the right hand side of the page (partitioned by a vertical bar and across the top of the page (with a pastel coloured background) you’ll see a set of results named “sponsored links”. These are paid-for adverts. They are kept separate so it’s quite clear that they are paid for.
The organisations that place these adverts usually pay nothing to place the advert, but they will make a small payment each time any searcher clicks on one of the links. This is known as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. The remainder of the results on your page (if you’re using Google) will be what are generally known as “Organic” results. No payment needed for these entries, just a fair amount of savvy and a good deal of hard work.
Whilst PPC advertising could well be an important part of your Online Marketing strategy as you hunt for a good Search Engine Placement, surveys have shown conclusively that searchers place greater trust in organic results than in pay er click adverts. This isn’t particularly surprising. Organic Search Engine Placement tends to be earned rather than bought. To be on page one of Google or any other modern search engine, you’ll need to have a website that is relevant and authoritative in the opinion of the search engines. Only by refining the results effectively, can the search engine be sure it provides exactly what the searcher requires.
The sophistication of the search engines means that they have lots of ways of making sure your site meets their criteria. In days gone by, it was possible to fool the search engines into serving up your website to an unsuspecting searcher regardless of how suitable (or unsuitable!) it was. Thankfully, we no longer have that problem. Search engines such as Google use rather subtle algorithms to determine the applicability of a result with the primary reasoning being that for a site to rank highly on a results page, especially for a common or competitive search phrase, that site will almost certainly require some citations – that is, it will need to be linked to by an authoritative source.
The downside, if indeed it is a downside, is that you now need to work hard to achieve the ranking necessary to get your site to the top of the listings. Whilst there are many “On-Page” changes that can be made to your web site that will ensure it has the best possible chance of being indexed appropriately by the search engines, that page 1 search slot will be very hard to achieve without the help of a search engine optimization company and a comprehensive and well designed Online Marketing campaign.
A good search engine optimization company will advise you on those localized coding changes you can make yourself, help you decide which keywords and phrases will achieve the best Search Engine Placement for you and then go on to produce a full Online Marketing campaign. This should ensure that your firm’s reputation as relevant and authoritative is reinforced and recognised by the search engines thereby helping make a page one Search Engine Placement a reality with all the business benefits that bestows.