PAY PER CLICK (PPC) and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is getting a lot of press nowadays, and many organizations believe they are doing a very good job on their web site with SEO. Hopefully this information will help ACTON web site visitors and clients better understand the world of search engines as they relate to the proper positioning of web sites. For more detailed information on this topic, please contact info@acton.com

Many organizations have invested thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, in developing their web sites. Frequently they discover the site is invisible to the major search engines. Failing to make a web site easy to find for the search engines can be very costly to the marketing efforts of the organization! Redesigning a web site and trying to take advantage of SEO can frequently be very expensive--not as expensive as missing the potential visitors!

Simply recognizing the importance of SEO will give you a significant advantage over any of your competition. There are several things to consider:

Before most people use a search engine to try to find a specific type of web site, they have already made four distinct choices:

1. They have chosen to use the Internet to find a specific product or service, and they have decided to use a search engine for this search.

2. A phrase which means what the searcher believes they are looking for becomes the basis of their search.

3. Most searchers will chose their favorite search engine--while Google and Yahoo dominate this, there are dozens of search engine opportunities to choose from.

4. Most people will only look at one or two pages of search results before they make a decision to click through to a web site that looks like what they are looking for (most regular searchers differentiate between paid and natural search, hence, the reason to make sure your natural search looks very good).

If you can boost your rankings on all the major search engines, the likelihood of people looking for the services you offer increases dramatically. It is important to remember someone searching is looking to solve an immediate problem they have--making sure you not only are easy to find, but your web site "delivers on the promise to solve this problem" will help you get the customer to the next step (contacting you, filling out a survey, etc.). If you position correctly, this will also help you with your natural search process.

SEO is very controversial, and nearly everyone with any amount of experience has an opinion. The major search engines are continuously updating and changing their algorithms and methods of search in order to evade simple tricks to raise natural search ranking. While somebody may adamantly profess to have direct hands-on experience with something which works, it is possible the methodology utilized by the search engines has been changed--this means there are no easy "tricks"; however, there are a number of very basic things which will move the needle and improve your search. The following is a short set of tips...

1) There are a number of submit services--these are very quick, but many experts believe the search engines can detect the use of these, hence, they can actually hurt your results rather than improve them.

2) Submission software is extremely effective but typically is very costly to secure, and requires sophisticated training to use effectively--it does require everyday work.

3) Individual submission of information is generally considered to be the very best way of doing things and is relatively inexpensive; however, it is very time-consuming. Many web sites experience at least one full-time person doing this in order to keep their natural search results up.

4) Key words properly positioned within your website are an extremely efficient way of building traffic. Key words can be purchased (this does not always help with natural search but certainly puts you at the top of paid search). A number of ACTON clients utilize this and get an excellent ROI.

5) Key phrases are probably more critical--as people search for things, they tend to put in phrases, which, in their mind, will find what they need. For a free listing of key phrases which are applicable to your web site, click here. As an example, ACTON's list division would like to have everyone who looks for mailing lists go to the ACTON web site. On a recent study done of key phrases, it was determined the phrase "mailing list" was submitted 85,212 times and the term list broker was submitted 2,120 times over a 30-day period. Numerous organizations are paying for key words and also are working judiciously on getting their search results up on these key words, so a secondary search of some of the additional word strings yielded some very interesting information and helped point ACTON in the correct direction for its own web site. Similar variations for your web site could help substantially:

• "Email mailing lists" was requested 4,279 times
  
• "Business mailing lists" was requested 2,726 times
  
• "Mailing list company" was requested 1,980 times
  
• "Consumer mailing list" was request 1,563 times
  
• "Direct mailing list" was requested 1,477 times
  
• "Targeted mailing list" was requested 953 times
  
• "Mailing list service" was requested 617 times
  

Simultaneously, "mailing list broker" was requested 1,494 times versus the 2,120 times for "list broker".

By working on these particular word strings and making sure there is relevant copy on the web site and actual information a searcher might be looking for, the search results have been substantially lifted. ACTON has hundreds of list properties in each category; however, without these being efficiently identified, the search engines would not know this, hence, they would not direct someone to the ACTON web site even though it may have more information than any other web site for these particular word strings.