Curious how some companies appear so high up in search engine rankings?  It's not by accident!  With thousands of websites all vying for the top spots in the search engines, getting there is a combination of time, knowledge and budget.  I'm not going to delve into all of the in's and out's of how search engines rank sites.  There are 300+ page books at your local Border's that can get into those details.  This article is meant to give a broad education on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Advertising (SEA), and how you can use these to get your website more traffic.

 

 

The area circled on the right represents the results based on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Search engines analyze your website and rank you based on numerous factors and algorithms.  These exact algorithms are proprietary, but each search engine looks at a lot of the same well known and common factors.

 

A few common factors (certainly not all of them) are listed below:

Achieving good rankings takes time.  The key is having a plan in place.  The most common misconception I've gotten is that if you put a keyword on your site you should pull up in the search engines.  There are hundreds of thousands of results for every keyword and phrase out there, it requires a lot more than that to be the best and pull up on page one.

 

 

The area circled on the right represents the results based on Search Engine Advertising (SEA).  These differ greatly from SEO results.  Rather than being ranked on criteria and algorithms, they are based on how much you are willing to spend.  How much you are willing to spend per click to be more precise.  The popular term for this is pay-per-click (PPC).  SEA results are easy and quick to achieve and can drive a lot of traffic to your site. 

Let's say for the term "laser engraving plaques" the top spot for the SEA results is currently paying $1.07 per time a user clicks into their website from the search engine. As long as you are willing to pay $1.08 per click you can have the top spot for that key phrase. The bidding for each keyword or phrase ranges based on the competition for it.  The bids change routinely so regular oversight is needed.  Essentially to get started with SEA all you need is a monthly budget you want to stick to and a list of keywords you want to pull up under.  Estimating your return is actually quite simple.  If your budget is $500 per month, and you are paying an average of $1.26/click for each of your keywords or phrases, you would expect to get an additional 396 visitors to your website per month.

 

 

Most likely you will want to hire a web development firm, such as core3, who specializes in this.  Core3 will help to identify a monthly budget and a list of keywords that are relevant to your industry.  After that its a matter of putting our knowledge of search engines to work to get you the best rankings possible!