Small Business SEO - Small Business SMO

This is an example of a Search Engine Optimization Analysis we did for one of our clients. Enjoy!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CeKFWe8I6M]

PPC (pay per click). Oh, what a feeling…

Google once again revolutionized search engines by initiating PPC advertising in 2003.

The way it works is simple. You bid on keywords, and based upon how much you bid you are willing to pay for each click, your ad is seen more prevalently in the results.

You only pay if someone clicks your ad and visits your site. The first true performance based advertising, and can be applied worldwide or just in your neighborhood, or any and everywhere in between. Amazing.

Even as others adopted this methodology. Google redid it’s structure so that the relevance of your ad, the page you would be sending visitors to in relation to the keyword you were bidding on, and the track record your ad had with past visitors, would be as important as, if not more important than, your bid price for that keyword.

This means if Google determines that your ad is the most relevant, and your landing page quality is the best or near the best, your ad will be shown higher than other—-even though they might be spending more per click. They way they assign this rank to each set of ads and pages is called Quality Score. Again, they are all about the end user and the quality of their results, even the sponsored results. Also the relevance of your ad is ultimately determined by your click-through rate, the percentage of people who see your ad divided by the number of those who actually click on it.

PPC can be very very effective and has taken billions of dollars in ad revenue from traditional media, because it offers 100 percent accountability, and the ads can be edited in the blink of an eye and/or turned on and off like a switch.

Now, because SEO is complex and can be expensive, people are opting for the immediate gratification of ppc marketing. But, as the number of advertisers rise, so do the bid prices across the board.

Not to mention, but advertising correctly on Google’s Adwords system is complex and remember they have a lot of ‘quality’ criteria that could make or break you.

So Google instituted a program to train people how to use their advertising effectively and it is called the Adwords Professional program, and is quite extensive. Also, as the market is the ultimate indicator of competence in any endeavor, you cant even be elegable for the program unless you manage someone else’s advertising campaigns and budget for a minimum spend of over 1000 dollars for over 90 days, on top of taking and passing their Professional Certification Exam.

Other PPC networks.

Don’t the other search engines have Pay Per Click Advertising?

Yes, and with much different levels of traffic and cost than Google’s. And here’s a kicker: Google has a program called “Adsense” that lets website owners publish Google sponsored links along side of the site content, and shares the generated revenue with the site owner if a user clicks an ad! As people caught wind of this they started churning out non-legible, computer generated websites meant only to appeal to search engine spiders and as the number of sites they owned grew, so did their Adsense checks. People were making a killing with this and making their ’spam’ sites to only serve ads. Google cracked down and if they caught you doing it, they would take your Adsense account from you.

In Google advertising, the network of individual websites that would display Google’s ads is called the ‘Content Network’, as the advertiser is actually advertising within website content as opposed to search results.

When Google started this, there was no distinction between what a user paid for a click that came from the search results or a content ad. Even though a new advertiser could opt out at anytime of the content network, the default setting was to be included. Since Google Adwords advertising was complex to begin with, the vast majority would never know they even could opt out.

As a result, some very dubious webmasters would join the Adsense network, build millions of sites very quickly using high tech computer programs, and then have other computer programs (bots) pretend to be users and click on the ads, thus generating a literal money machine for the spammer.

Google then hired lots and lots of human editors to go through it’s index and weed out the spam, and it also started allowing users to make a different bid for the ads in the Content Network than it did for the Search Network, or the reuslts that would be shown on Google’s results and/or the results shown on the other search engines that license Google’s algorithm.

This seriously changed the game for alot of folks.

PPC Arbitrage

Remember how we said their were many other ppc networks with varying traffic and bids for the same keywords as would be served by Google?

Well, after Google slapped down on Adsense spammers who would use natural Search Engine rankings to fuel their traffic, these people decided they would just buy their traffic from one search engine and ’sell’ the traffic to a higher paying search engine and pocket the results.

Free traffic from Search Engines has been a windfall for many businesses.

As people started wanting to get more of the free traffic and increased revenue high Search Engine listings could provide, Search Engine Optimization firms popped up, offering to help those who wanted these results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has three types:

White Hat: Follow the search engine ‘rules’ and genuinely try to help the Search Engine by making pages more ‘Search Engine Friendly’
(read: easily crawled and indexed by search engines)

Black Hat: Will try to manipulate the natural search engine results in a number of ways. If you get caught, your site can be banished from the search engine altogether or penalized to where you will get no traffic, ever. (Also known as search engine ’spamming’.)

Grey Hat: Mostly white hat, but will bend or break a rule every now and then, or looks for ‘grey’ areas of the search engines to exploit. Powerful to a point without penalty, if done correctly. (Not usually done correctly)

The web started out as a single web page in 1990. As more web servers and web pages sprang up, Mosaic and later Netscape became the first browsers that would let everyone be able to ’see; webpages as they were available for every type of desktop configuration. Bear in mind this was in 1993, a full three years after the first ‘webpage’ was put up.

Soon after the first ’spider’ was developed and did little more than collect urls, but paved the way for others to create programs that used word associations to search document collections.

Then In 1994 a bunch of Standford students created the search engine Yahoo, which was the first to assign hierarchical status to each document in their directory based upon the “search parameters”.

Search engines and their spiders proliferated without too much distinguishing traits, except for the fact the full text from pages and even user feedback could now be indexed and used in the search results to determine relevancy.

Then Google was born. Or rather started by Larry Page (who invented PageRank while at Standford University) and was used as the official search engine of Standford University.

Google indexed pages much differently from the competition and had a drive for maximum usability and relevance. They didn’t flood their sites with text, banners, and ads. Nor did they include sponsored results inside the organic results.

By this time it is 2003, and Google not only had the lion’s share plus some of the world ’search’ market, but they also licensed their algorithm to other search engines.

So this is why Google is the king of search, at least as of writing this in early 2008.

The only difference between 2008 and 2003 is that Yahoo and MSN have stopped using the Google algorithm and have started their own. Too little, too late.

Search Results

What you see when you go to any search engine and search for anything is the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

This is a mix, in one way or the other, of organic (natural) listings for the search term and sponsored results for the search term.

Without the sponsored results, search engines could not turn a profit.

Basically web spiders crawl from page to page through links and index the content and details of each page and assign it a score based on different criteria. Then when a user searches using a keyword, the hierarchical results are displayed along with the ads or sponsored results. They might be mixed together, or they might be kept somewhat separate (as in Google’s case)

This brings us to where we are presently at in the History of Search Engines

The first myth of SEO is that you need to submit your site to search engines.

No way, Jose! Trust me, they want to come find you. You don’t need to pay anyone to do this for you.

Real SEO is much, much more than that and is worth the money…most of the time…but we’ll get to that part soon enough.jus

The other myth we need to  just mention (there is a whole section devoted to it: Social Media Marketing). The myth is that Facebook and MySpace are going to make you rich overnight. Or at all. If you don’t even own them.

But, I promise there is much more in store…

This is the part of building this that I was looking forward to! More soon…

When I first started offering my services to clients I had absolutely zero intention of offering Search Engine Optimization Services.

I had been doing SEO for my own sites for years, but it had never occurred to me that others were interested in it for their own sites. I really thought it was a right of passage for webmasters and netpreneurs to go on this journey themselves.

THAT is the kind of thinking one develops when they are immersed in the Internet Marketing world for years.

I came to find out that most people have better things to do.

I just wanted my sites to make money, and because I had tried the typical Search Engine Optimization Firms (the kind that rip off the vast majority of unsuspecting boobs who are new to all of this.

So, once I realized that “submitting my site to hundreds of search engines” was crap, and that the “get top ranking in Google in 48 hours” was crap as well, I got down to business.

Three years later, I quit my 100K/yr day job and did….nothing.

Why not?

My sites were doing that well.

But then a strange thing happened to me. I got bored and thought I would offer my services to others.

But I was more interested in offering Google Adwords management. I love to brag that I rock at Google Adwords, and they love my 6-15k per month as well. (Even though my sites rank in the top ten for alot of very competitive keywords, PPC is a huge part of my overall Search Engine Marketing Strategy that I employ.

I also had developed a call tracking solution that integrates with Google Conversion tracking, so I paired these two up, added a web based CRM package and went to selling my services.

But, everyone kept telling me to shut up about that stuff and wanted to know more about SEO (Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated).

My first month in offering SEO  was a 6k month, with NO advertising, no website, no nothing.

Henceforth I offer my search engine optimization services.

We’ll be discussing other Search Engine Optimization Firms on a regular basis here, the good, the bad, and the downright criminal.

Stay tuned…