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An Integrated Approach To Search Engine Marketing
With research suggesting that around 90% of all e-commerce purchases coming as a result of a search engine enquiry, the potential selling power that having a significant presence on the main search engines can confer is slowly beginning to dawn on...
How do I drive traffic to a brand new website?
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady Every single day, more and more people upload brand new websites to the Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be hundreds of thousands of new pages being added daily (if not considerably more!) The one...
If You Build It, They Will Come...
...No they won't. On the web, building a web site is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, no-one is going to visit it. The site won't even be listed in any of the search engines without some incoming links. To get traffic, you...
Independent Search Engine & Directory Network (ISEDN) - Breaking News!
Watch out for a shift in the pay-per-click (PPC) industry, happening right now! This shift is finally going to give smaller search engines and directories the ability to tap into the PPC market, currently monopolized by the big guns online...
LookSmart Answer Their Critics
If you've read my article "LOOKs Can Be Deceiving" (http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/LOOKs_Can_Be_Deceiving.htm), you'll already know how I feel about LookSmart's recent decision to change their US-based directory model at www.looksmart.com...
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Why Optimize Your Site For Search Engines?
Sometimes a search engine optimization company will miss that glaring question posed by potential clients and assume the benefits of search engine optimization are obvious to everyone. While shelling out a couple thousand on an SEO campaign is common sense to some, others may find it hard to part with the cash unless they know it is an investment in their business that is sure to bring a good return.
Search engines account for a huge portion of traffic to web sites. Data varies depending on what sources you read, but the bottom line is that search engines are used millions of times each day by consumers searching for goods and services. And having your business displayed at the top of search results is essential if you want to do any business from the major search engines. Nine in every ten users will find what they're looking for in the top 10 results and won't go to page 2.
It's obvious that people can make a lot of money from online sales, but how you advertise your products has a large bearing on what kind of profit you make. If you buy advertising space on Google AdWords or other services that charge per click, you may only shell out 10 cents for every visitor to your site - But what if it takes 100 clicks to make one sale? If your products only sell for $10 a piece, then there is no profit being made. Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns will also never stop costing you money. Search Engine Optimization, on the other hand, can be very affordable over months and years.
Many SEO and Internet Marketing companies will say that ongoing maintenance is needed to reach and keep top search engine rankings. While this is true, be careful how the
company says they do it. There is an affordable way and then there's a way to pad the pockets of the "experts." For more on this issue, read my other article entitled "What Constitutes a Complete and Effective SEO Campaign?" In short, the affordable way will involve an intense content optimization followed by work to raise link popularity. This link popularity development should be the bulk of any ongoing maintenance. A couple times a year keyword research should be done again and the content should be looked at. Search trends can sometimes fluctuate so you want to make sure your content is still aimed at the right audience.
What is affordable and what isn't varies greatly from company to company, industry to industry. In the bed and breakfast industry, $30 per month may be enough to keep a top 5 ranking on Google if the market is not very competitive. A web site competing for a top spot in a database administration field may be looking at several hundred a week if not more. The bottom line is, if you pick the right Search Engine Optimization company, your return on investment from an SEO campaign can be over 1000%.
While there are other ways to advertise a web site (No, search engine optimization is not the be-all and end-all of online advertising) very few can match the wide targeted audience and affordability that search engines provide.
About the Author
John Metzler is the co-creator of Abalone Designs, Inc. www.abalone.ca, a Search Engine Optimization company in Vancouver, Canada. He has been involved in web design and web marketing since 1999 and has helped turn Abalone Designs into one of the top SEO companies in the world.
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