Full text search engines got their start with WebCrawler, created by Brian Pinkerton in 1994. It was a desktop application to start with and had 4,000 hand aggregated websites for its database. That’s a far cry from the 3.5 billion webpages that World Wide Web reports today, with fancy talk of organic search engine optimization and more apps than you can shake a stick at these days. Search engine optimization has evolved over the years alongside the influence of the search engines they utilize for traffic in a fascinating historical journey.
SEO in the Beginning
It took a few years after WebCrawler for Yahoo and Google to come onto the scene. Yahoo had its portal website set up in 1995, providing links to many categories of web pages. Google didn’t show up until 1998, along with the DMOZ. Search engine optimization didn’t get into full swing until there were more search engines and directories that used algorithm-produced results, as opposed to human-selected listings.
Marketers took advantage of Yahoo’s dependence on alphabetical sorting in 1995, and began looking at the way search engines sorted their machine-generated listings in 1996. Keyword density was a major factor then, along with website age. Marketers used a variety of techniques to put as many instances of their keywords on their page as possible, using white text on white pages, filling up meta data and taking other actions that are considered spam today. Excite’s algorithm was cracked and revealed the 35 different factors that went into ranking those pages.
SEO Over the Past Decade
Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes these days, but it was a simpler time when Google came up with the PageRank algorithm. It got updated monthly and adjusted the rankings during that time period. Most search engine optimization was still centered on spam techniques, such as buying massive amounts of in-bound links, filling up footers with links and any other technique that could be thought of to bring in more inbound links.
Google took a stand against spammy sites with November 2003’s Florida update. Many top sites vanished from the face of the search engines, and webmasters around the world panicked. Google specifically focused on websites that went too far with search engine optimization, and took them out of the index. As time went on, Google continued to adjust their search engine rankings to reward sites with good content. Content-based marketing became popular as a way to increase relevancy, although it wasn’t always useful content for readers. Instead, it stuck to strict keyword percentages to stay out of the spammy range.
The year 2005, was the first time personalized results were introduced to the search engine. It changed the results shown in the search engine rankings by whether or not the person was logged into their Google account. That made it harder for webmasters to figure out what ranking everyone saw them as.
These days, video and social media marketing work well, as Google’s unified search brings together results from all of their channels. Go forth and conquer!
Benjamin C is a technology reporter who covers Internet-related topics.
Nonprofit SEO has obtained a number of myths and legends over the years. As the search engines change their algorithms consistently, nonprofits who don’t keep up hold onto past truths which are no longer valid. Nonprofits need to review the myths then reposition their marketing to avoid falling into these pitfalls.
Myth #1. Domain Age is an Essential Ranking Factor
This is the first myth nonprofits should throw out the window. Often, smaller organizations are start-ups and haven’t had a chance to grow, which means the domain is still quite young. Nonprofit organizations only need to wait a couple months before the impact of the domain age no longer matters to search engines.
Some agencies swear by domain age as a ranking factor because older domains are ranking higher. Older domains have had time to build on themselves and include items which do matter to rankings. A beginning nonprofit site holds as much competitive SEO clout as an older site after only a few months on the search engines.
Myth #2. The Only Way to Grow Traffic is to Increase Ratings
Every nonprofit needs to grow their site views, and while links, relevance and content matter, they aren’t the only way to increase rankings. The top sites on the search engines will claim that traffic estimates for keywords are touch and go most of the time. Pouring effort into a single ranking is a massive waste of time; there are better ways to increase rankings and grow traffic.
The best efforts put forth by nonprofits include concentrating on promotional materials while composing content built around low-competition keywords. If promotions don’t work right away, nonprofits should focus on producing more content. Increased content will help push rankings.
Myth #3. Links Rule Above All Else
Links are great, and certainly encouraged, but they’re not the most important SEO factor. People consider links to be essential due to their elusiveness and crucial traffic driving properties. However, focusing on links will waste valuable time which could be spent on other ranking efforts.
The word is not links; it’s relevance. How relevant are the links associated with the site? Google and other search engines need to recognize the relevance of the links on the site to match with the search terms. Therefore, links are great, but make sure they hold relevance to the content on the page and the nonprofit organization’s brand before allowing them onto the site.
Developing leadership qualities might be considered subjective when every leader needs to fit his or her own personality into running their organization.
There are currently over one hundred thousand texts on the market that deal with the concept of leadership development, and this number is continually rising.
The name of our presentation today is HELP! My Website is a Ghost Town. This presentation is targeting small business owners and non-profits who are at the place where they are considering hiring an SEO company. They might not know how much traffic they are currently getting, and they probably don’t know how much traffic their competition’s websites are getting.
You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if nobody is going to it, you might as well have no website at all. The subtitle here is How to bring your website back from the dead or When to hire an SEO company.
Does hiring an agency make sense for you at this time? If, for some reason, we reach the end of the presentation and you determine that—based on what I told you—you’re not a candidate for hiring an SEO company, I am going to give you a resource that has over a 100 ideas for driving traffic to your websites.
Sound good? Cool. Let’s get started.
Why Market Online?
What we care about as small business owners is helping people; we are in business to provide a service or product that elevates others in some way; improves their quality of life in some way. Obviously, if we are not in business with that in mind, then we are going to be out of business pretty soon.
Now, when we do this, it needs to be sustainable. We need to be able to trade our services or products for money, and if we are not making more this year than we did last year, we are contracting as a business (i.e. we are not expanding, but contracting, and so we are going out of business.)
Marketing 101 tells us in order to grow a company or business, you need to have more exposure. More exposure online will lead into more clicks, more sets of eyes in front of your web pages, looking at your products, services, your brand, your cause (whatever it is) and those clicks will convert into sales, leads, phone calls, emails or whatever your conversion is—whatever you are trying to track, whatever you are trying to convince people to do—you need more exposure in order to get more folks to do it.
Being easier to find online is one of the way you’re going to expand on your exposure.
Making a Safe Investment
We all care about making an investment, whether stock, bonds, mutual funds, or, in this case, our marketing. When making a investment, we want to see a return. We don’t want to make investment that loses; nobody wants that. It’s not a good feeling to lose on an investment, so success here is what we are targeting.
Some of our challenges in the market place are going to be our competitors; we are not alone in the market place, we are not usually the only one offering our service or the product. There are other folks that the market can turn to and so we are vying with that group of people for the same customers and their money. You can sometimes partner with your competitor (and that’s good,) but that’s an entirely different presentation, so think of your competitors as competitors for now.
Falling behind and becoming obsolete is something you need to watch out for and avoid. Being hard to find can also can also cost you. Obviously, if your competitor is in the top spots of Google.com, they’re making money. If you are on page 4 in Google, you’re likely making considerably less money though your website than your competitors are in positions 1, 2 or 3 on Google for the same key phrase. There are competitors; you are not only fighting in the local market place, in real time, but you also compete online.
Competing online is important, and getting the top spot in Google and the other search engines is important for your business. We’re talking about a 24/7/365 salesperson who can deliver your message—details about your product or service—all the time without you being there to do it. That’s fantastic! If you are not leveraging your website and your rank in the search engines, you’re missing out.
Does Hiring an SEO Agency Make Sense for You?
Scenario #1: Hot Dogs
Say you have the best hotdog stand in town. This is your business and you want to expand it so you go to a local internet marketing company who specializes in search engine optimization (search engine marketing) and playing the Google game. So you go to these folks and they say, “Alright Mr./Ms. Customer, you can pay us somewhere between $500, 1,000 to $10,000 (you can pay a lot for search engine marketing company;) you will pay us $800 a month and we are going to bring you 100 more people each week to your website.”
You say “Great! I love you! A hundred more people a week!” The conversion rate must be around five per cent, so now you got another five hotdog sales each week so that means after those five hotdog sales—after you pay for the hotdog, buns, ketchup and mustard, onions and all that—you net about $20.
Did you win or fail on that proposition?
I’ll wager you failed. This does not in any way cover the cost of the agency, even if they were only charging $500 a month (which is low.)
Yes, you can kind of console yourself by saying, “Well I’m considering it a branding and marketing expense,” and it certainly is, but search engine marketing is one of the few marketing expenses you’re going to make in this world that can actually pay you a dividend back. It’s one of the truly self-sustaining marketing channels.
A lot of the other marketing channels may work, or they may not. With search engine marketing you can tell whether or not it’s working by the amount of clicks and phone calls you are receiving. If you ask people who call how did they find your company and they say, “Oh, I found you on your website after I did a search in Google,” that’s when you know it’s working.
Scenario #2: Dermatologist
Now say you are a dermatologist and you go to the same search engine marketing company and they are especially lazy today and say “Mr./Ms. Customer we’ll get you a 100 more people per month into your website.”
Say this company is a dog! They just cannot market a website to save their lives, so they scratch out 100 more people to your website a month. That extra 25 clicks a week are awful so they go through this at 5% conversion rate just like we saw before. You are getting five new clients per month. Now, due to the nature of your business you are netting $200-1000 per client, right?
What do you say? Does that win or fail?
I would say that wins! Due the types of clients you take in, the increase in business does more than cover the cost of the SEO agency.
Let’s SEO Review
A few things to go over here: 5% conversion rate is a little conservative, especially when it comes to a local search.
Most Google traffic can convert better than that when you are doing a local search, so if you are doing a search for heat and cooling companies for your local area, or lumber for your local area, it’s likely that if they find you they are going to give you a call because they are looking for a heating or cooling company or something along those lines.
This depends on your niche. It also depends on your targeted key terms. If you target key phrases and nobody is looking for those key phrases, good for you. You can pay a lot of money and dominate key phrases that nobody is doing a search on.
We have had people want to do this before. We warned them and then we ranked them for those key phrases. Once they got in there and they realized they were not getting any clicks, we asked them, “So what are your other targets? Where else do you want to show up?”
Then we walked them though a proper keyword analysis and they got a sense that “It’s very good that I ranked for this, but gosh yeah, let’s target this other one too.”
Some industries are more SEO-savvy. If you are in the middle of the desert, you are probably going to dominate to your local area for whatever your key phrase is, since there’s probably not a lot of competition in the marketplace.
In larger, more metropolitan areas, you might have more competitions, and again here it depends how search engine marketing-savvy they are. If they are not terribly savvy, then they are not going to be engaging in the search engine optimization practices that would help them gain more solid rankings. As soon as you start bumping up your “armor” as it were, you are going to find you are climbing the rankings very quickly.
So success online depends on your niche. It depends on the key phrases you’re selecting. It depends on lots of different factors. Usually, in local places, we can get up to 10-11% conversion or higher.
Again it depends on a lot of factors.
Final Questions to Ask Yourself
Are you on page 2 or higher on your target key phrase?
If you are already on page 1, you might have already hired an SEO company to help out, or your industry might be weak as far as SEO savvy.
If you are on page 2… or page 3… or 4… or 50… or 60… or 80… you might as well not exist. You’re probably getting very few phone calls, few email inquiries, and if you are hungry for it—if you want to be easily found online—then you might want to seriously consider hiring an SEO company.
Furthermore, do you even want more paying costumers? This is not a smart-Alec question, necessarily. I’m not trying to be a smart-Alec when I ask it. Some folks are in the place with their business where they are maxed out. If you are maxed out, or you are humming along and you are content with the amount of business you have, you are not obviously going to be in interested in marketing further and therefore gaining more paying costumers.
At the end of the day, when it comes down to hiring an SEO company, it’s really about turning this ghost town website you might have—you might have spent thousands of dollars on it and yet when you finally do get Google Analytics installed (or any analytics software installed)—you see how much traffic you are not getting. You see where your rankings aren’t or where your competition is.
Get Started
We have two different ways if you think you’re ready to dive into SEO. We have flat-rate SEO pricing on some of our plans, and we just brought on a performance-based SEO plan where you pay a small entry fee then you don’t pay again until we start ranking you on the key phrases we help you select. So that’s very competitive and we are still piloting it. We just released the pay-for-performance SEO plan recently, so forgive the video if we have cancelled the program by the time you get to us, but for now we have the two different marketing plans for business.
In closing, whether you have three staff people or 300 staff people, remember: If your lifetime value per client can merit hiring a search engine marketing agency, you probably want to do it, because frankly, being at the top of Google can mean a lot of activity, a lot more leads and a lot more sales or donations or souls saved.
That it, folks! I’m Matthew Schoenherr of Levaire. Have questions? Leave them in the comments below!
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of generating traffic and improving visibility of a webpage on search engine rankings. It is the process of making a website more robot-friendly. With evolving technology, digitized content has become the norm. Individuals have shifted from hard copies to digital content. Firms are taking the digital route and opting for content marketing techniques in order to promote their products and build brand value. In this context, SEM holds greater relevance and it is crucial for organizations to understand how SME functions in order to make full use of its potential.
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO, as it is popularly known) is the process of improving a website’s visibility so that it appears more prominently in the unpaid search results of a search engine. The SEO process uses keywords in order to make a website more relevant to search queries. By using SEO effectively, organizations can generate more traffic to their websites, thereby gaining more exposure for their messages, products and services.
SEM and SEO, though are relatively new concepts in the past decade, have gained great significance in the world of search engines. A site is ranked based on the keyword density and selection, which is turn determines the relevance of the site to the search query keyed in by the user. Using SEO, organizations use a myriad of techniques to build backlinks to their pages from other credible sources in order to increase their own page rank. Even though Google depreciated its importance in 2012, link-building still holds a lot of prominence in the world of SEO and SEM.
Here are several tips and tricks employed by webmasters to increase traffic and visibility of a webpage.
Some of the most commonly used tips and tricks in SEM are:
1. Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) (tracked by Cost Per Click) is a paid method of advertising, used to drive traffic to a website where organizations pay ad publishers when their ad is clicked by users. In a pay per click campaign, keywords relevant to the context and the target market are selected to increase the visibility of a website. Websites that use PPC marketing, route traffic to a site when a keyword query matches a user’s search query. One of the drawbacks of the PPC is the high possibility for click fraud, where automated robots are used to increase click count, thereby increasing the traffic and revenue generated from a website.
2. Cost Per Impression
The display of an ad to a user browsing a webpage is called an impression. Cost Per Impression (CPI) is an SEM technique related to web traffic, where advertisers pay every time an advertisement is displayed. CPI is used to assess the effectiveness and profitability of online search engine marketing. The advantage of CPI over PPC is its immunity to click fraud. Hence, the traffic numbers derived from CPI analytics are considered more reliable when compared to PPC analytics.
3. Paid Listings
Organizations may use paid listings from search engine hosting companies (think Google and Facebook) in order to increase the visibility and increase traffic. Paid listings help agencies increase their page traffic and rank through inorganic means, which is especially helpful to organizations or ad campaigns just getting launched. Established organizations that have developed a level of credibility may not choose to invest in paid listings as they may already enjoy regular traffic.
4. Catchy Domain Names
It is easy to understand how using catchy domain names increases the market’s ability to recall a brand. Domain names—when combined with the right keywords—can lead to boosted traffic, more click-throughs and higher conversions. Search engine marketing tips that include finding the right domain names can lead to organic traffic that may be difficult to get under normal circumstances.
5. Content Priority
Credible content relevant to the user is a best way to divert traffic to a webpage. Solid content that is well-written and informative while being free of rambling, keyword-stuffed blathering, is sure to (eventually) show up in organic search results. For organizations focusing less on organic ways of growing traffic to a website, however, PPC and CPI are still tried and tested ways of increasing traffic to a webpage quickly.
6. Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Similar to using catchy domain names, SEO-friendly URLs are also dependable techniques employed to increase traffic to a webpage. Marketing using keyword-targeted URLs may produce favorable results over a period of time. But this technique may not be helpful in increasing traffic suddenly. All organic ways of increasing traffic work over a period of time and do not usually lead to sudden increases in web traffic.
7. Tags and Meta Descriptions
Using tags and meta descriptions is a smart way of implementing SEM strategies. Though URLs and domain names do not provide the luxury of using lengthy phrases with the desired keyword density, tags and meta tags act as additional searchable text that can be fine-tuned according to the desired keyword density. Keyword-targeted tags can increase the visibility of a site in an organic search which increases the trustworthiness of a particular site. Including title and alt tags for every web page will also increase the chances for high page rank due to the increased keyword relevance and density.
Go Forth
All said and done, search engine marketing is a dynamic concept which employs SEO as one of the cornerstones behind increasing user traffic. SEO techniques such as choosing the proper keywords, ensuring content matches your audience and developing credible backlinks from other websites are sure to produce results over time. In a hurry? PPC and CPI can speed your message, product or service to market. Use these techniques over time to build external links, build your traffic and grow your following and you will be effectively using SEM techniques. God bless!
