SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

There are two major search engine marketing strategies in use today: SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click). These two methods are very different, and deciding which one is right for you can be hard. Which one do you think will do more for your website? Well, that all depends on what your websites like.

One leading contributor to the difficulty in deciding which is correct for your site is that you dont really understand why you cant just use both. There is no real reason that you cannot implement both methods when marketing your site, in fact, I encourage this behavior as PPC can be integrated quite nicely into an SEO plan.

PPC is a good way to get users to become more familiar with your site. Once they are used to seeing your site, they will probably begin to stick around if they encounter it in a search engine. The more often that your site is visited the more that search engines will like it. This is one reason that it is so crucial to attempt to get as many quality hits as possible.

Reading up on the pros and cons of each program lets you sit down and decide in your own time which strategy would work best for your website. Since search engine marketing is undoubtedly the best source of targeted traffic out there at the moment, as people will continue to battle for the top search engine positions, even from day to day.

As people continually try to find new and unique ways to being additional traffic to their websites, the SEO industry continues to grow. PPC refers to text-based advertising on a search engine, and you will be charged by the click whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads. These order of ads is usually based on bidding prices, meaning that the advertiser who bids the highest price per click will be listed first. Weve all heard of sponsored listings, right? Well, thats what they are: PPC listings.

SEO tries to change your search ranking by looking at a number of factors, including link popularity, PageRank, and so on. Rankings you get through SEO will appear on the main, natural search results pages, not over in the box with the sponsored links. And you dont have to pay for your clicks!

So, how can we tell which method is better? You cant say that one method will always be better, because they serve different purposes. However, one is likely to be a better fit with your business than the others.

PPC.

PPC traffic, rankings and results tend to be more stable and predictable than SEO, and, combined with its low cost, this makes PPC one of the more popular ways of advertising. Most companies try PPC before they try SEO, because its seen as more stable and respectable.

In many cases PPC lets you rank high on the search engines, without having to do the tedious work involved in SEO no finding link partners, posting links, and so on. As long as you have the budget for it, the rankings yours, and another advantage is that the listing will get posted when you add it, not when the search engine gets round to it.

Sadly, PPCs popularity makes it a competitive market. You will find that CPCs (costs per click) are steadily rising, and that hurts the little guys. Prices work as auctions the more people in the auctions, the higher the prices.

SEO.

The main benefit of SEO is that it can be done entirely for free, and lets face it, who doesn’t like free traffic?

The disadvantages, though, are that your traffic is unpredictable. You have to guess, adapt, and constantly change strategies. One month you could just fall out of the top 10 without any warning, and there goes your income. SEO is also slower than PPC, as the search engines only update their natural listings about once a month.

So what should you choose? Well, it depends on how much money you have to spend. If you have cash then PPC should be your first choice, as it produces faster results. If youre on a low budget, you should look at SEO first. The best thing to do, though, is to use both techniques together use PPC for some keywords and SEO for others, depending on the keywords price.

Many SEO experts will tell you that they have specific ways of choosing the right keywords for a website. Some do it using SEO tools software that compares possible keywords to see which are used the most. Some will give you DIY methods with spreadsheets. We say, however, that you should try every method you can in the search for keywords. Here are some steps that might help:

Identify and create a list of keywords from meta tags, research on your competitors, your highest-converting products and biggest current traffic sources. For each term (typically between 30 and 50 terms overall), narrow the field down to about 15 or 20, choosing the terms you feel are most relevant to your website. Your higher ranked competitors are probably up there for a reason so take a look at what they are providing. Make sure that everything is directly relevant and try to stretch yourself out into some unchartered water. The less common that your key words are, the more likely you are to get the search engine results for these key words.

We would recommend a piece of software called WordTracker to find out how many searches have been done on a certain term. You can choose to work with this information however you want spreadsheets are good, but you can use anything that will make it easy reasonably easy for you to track these keywords. Youre trying to find a popular word that has a low competition rate. Although this is easier said than done, its very rewarding to find an area where your site can succeed because of the lack of competition. You should remember, though, that these search databases are relatively small, and should be used for comparing keywords against one another rather than for estimating their true market sizes.

This keyword selection research should then be compared with client experience of which keywords may be most profitably optimized, as well as any current ranking on the target keywords. Data from PPC campaigns can be helpful for this. The outcome should be a focused list of, say, 15-20 keywords that are both strong performers in terms of search volume, as well as solid candidates for successful optimization.

When determining how profitable your key words are you should look into your web sites statistics and see what key words were used for what number of sales. This is called your conversion rate. The more sales that are associated with a certain key word, the more valuable that key word is. It is important to account for all of the variables, however. If ten people come across your site through a certain key word but only one of them buys an item this key word isnt as profitable as a key word that one person finds your site through and still orders a product. It is important to work percentages into your decision of worth of a key word. Your conversion rate is the number of sales divided by the number of visitors.

You probably know who your competitors are, so go to their site and open the source code of a few of their pages (select View Source from your browsers menu). Look for the tag to see which keywords theyre aiming for. Their keywords are often garbage, but if you look around at a few sites then you can often find keywords you hadnt thought of. It is not good practice to simply copy and paste a list of key words. It would even be concievable that you would be charged with copyright infringement for such activities. Whether or not you get charged, it is morally wrong. Looking through and coming across a few extra relevant key words is one thing. Steeling an entire list is something else completely.

Another approach is to type in the keywords you have in mind and look at the current top results. Analyze their pages for keywords, descriptions and content this will give you some idea of what kind of keyword density you should be looking at for your keywords. If the sites that come up are a different kind of business to you altogether then youve probably chosen a dodgy keyword remember that youre trying to get relevant traffic, not just any traffic.

The general rules that you need to keep in mind when selecting key words are:

1. Try to select unique key words that your competitors have not thought of.

2. Optimize for your most profitable key words. How many sales does the key word generate? How much profit is made for each of these sales?

3. Make sure that the key words are very relevant to your site so that people who find your site through your key words will not immediately leave.

4. Try to assemble a list of key words that covers your site very will so that you arent leaving anyone or anything out.