Investing in Pay Per Click Marketing or Search Engine Optimization

by Scott Buresh
Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing
Atlanta, Georgia United States

As click costs rise, many companies who are already investing in active pay per click marketing campaigns are looking toward hiring a search engine optimization company to supplement their marketing portfolio in order to increase their exposure and reduce their advertising spend. In some cases, frustrated by click fraud and increasing click costs, marketers are using search engine optimization to completely replace pay per click marketing. However, these companies will often try to evaluate search engine optimization using the same methodology that they had used for pay per click - by figuring out the cost per click.

In almost every case, a campaign created by a reputable search engine optimization company will eventually garner lower per click costs than pay per click marketing for any industry. Yet using cost per click to compare the effectiveness of these two separate disciplines is comparing apples to, well, anything other than apples. The crucial difference between these two approaches is that pay per click marketing is more of an advertising investment, while search engine optimization is more appropriately likened to an investment in infrastructure. While both have their merits in terms of increasing a company's online exposure, it is important to understand the differences in the respective investments and to determine why cost per click is not a fair indicator of the performance of a search engine optimization company.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Advertising investments of all kinds, from billboards to print ads to television spots to pay per click marketing, all share a common trait. They exist in the public eye for as long as a company is willing to pay for them. Stop paying, and they disappear. True, a print ad may continue to exist for a while after it runs (until the newspaper or magazine gets recycled, at least), and a television spot may get attention if it wins any awards (or winds up on YouTube). But a pay per click marketing campaign will simply vanish as soon as the budget is cut. This means that when a company reduces its advertising spend in this arena, it loses all of its exposure immediately.

What does this really mean? Well, for one, it means that figuring out the average per click costs of a pay per click marketing campaign makes sense because everything happens in real time. A pay per click campaign will begin nearly instantly after a company signs up and pays, and it will vanish just as quickly when the company ceases payment. In other words, there is a clear delineation of when a campaign begins and when it ends.

This delineation is important, because it excludes many other potential factors that muddy the waters when you try to apply this same ROI analysis to a campaign created by a search engine optimization company.

Search Engine Optimization

As said previously, utilizing a search engine optimization company can be likened to making an investment in the infrastructure of a business rather than an investment in advertising. This is because with search engine optimization, there is no clear delineation of where the benefit from the campaign ends. If a business stops paying its search engine optimization company at any point after the campaign has been launched (presuming they have hired a decent search engine optimization company), there will continue to be results from that campaign for an extended period of time, usually many months or even years.

Of course, it is not recommended that any business actually quit an ongoing SEO campaign because a good search engine optimization company will always be expanding and honing that campaign over time to make it more successful over the long term. However, budgets get revisited and revised. Decision makers can change. And if the budget for SEO does get cut, a business will continue to see results for long after. How, then, can you determine value on a per-click basis? The simple answer is that you can't.

It should be noted that while maintaining ongoing results after payments have ceased is a big upside to search engine optimization, the inverse downside is that an effective campaign put in place by a search engine optimization company can take some time to implement, and the results may not appear for weeks or months. A search engine optimization campaign takes patience, effort, and, most of all, time. If a business needs its marketing campaign to be up and running immediately, pay per click marketing is going to be a better short term choice.

Conclusion

It is important to recognize the innate differences in pay per click campaigns and search engine optimization when trying to quantify results. A pay per click marketing campaign can have a definitive beginning and end, which makes cost per click a good way of determining ROI. Yet the results gained from hiring a search engine optimization company, although an SEO campaign can take much longer to implement, will outlast the results from a pay per click campaign if a business ever needs to cut spending. And this is where the notion of analyzing the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign on a cost per click basis breaks down.

©2007 Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing - All rights reserved.

Do it yourself Search Engine Optimization

By: Junaid Ashraf

Search engine optimization and web design have become activities that are very popular and accessible to regular people. There is a lot of information available on the web for those eager to get their teeth into it. Basically, if you've got plenty of time on your hands and have a fairly good knowledge of how the Internet works, you could learn to do it all yourself. However, the learning process is a time consuming one and it would mean deterring yourself from day to day aspects of your business which require your attention.

There are millions of websites on the internet for different topics and it’s difficult to find one. The best way to finding desire site to using search engines, but the search engine may result more than 100000’s of websites. Websites with high ranking are listed in first few pages. Well, how would you make your website listed as high as possible in the result results?

In order to achieve this you need to work on Search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is as complex as traditional marketing. It's applied to a completely different medium, the online one. Even professional companies sometimes offer only some SEO services instead of the whole package.

We have gathered some important tips to make it ease and help you to understand the process involved.

Site Page Naming for Search Engine Optimization

Page names are important! Relevant pages should be named after their primary keyword phrase.

Site File Names Analysis for Search Engine Optimization

Like the directory structure, file names play an equally important role. All file names should contain primary keywords or keyword phrases.

Web Page Title for Search Engine Optimization

The title tag of your page is the single most important factor to be considered when optimizing your web page for the search engines. It is because most engines & directories place a high level of importance on keywords that are found in your title tag.

Meta Tags for Search Engine Optimization

Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated above, but are not visible to a user looking at the site.

Meta tags are one of the most important elements of a web page when a search engine indexes it. This was originally created to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise. For Example, related keywords or a description of the page itself.

A search engine to display a short description of what your web page contains very often uses the description Meta tag. Some search engines look at the keywords entered into the keywords meta tag and will use this to display your page in the search results if it is one of the words used in the search criteria.
Web Page Copywriting

Like a Meta and Title tags, the content of your page is an important element in the search engine optimization process. The page copy being the actual, visible main content of the page should be presented and arranged in a logical and visually pleasing manner.

1. For the best results each page you submit should contain at least 200 words.
2. Include all keywords and arrange them in logical and readable manner.
3. More interlinking of keywords throughout the website.

Site Navigation for Search Engine Optimization

Is your site’s navigation search engine friendly? Search engines require simple text based navigation in order to correctly spider your website. Java Script based navigation only, results in an incomplete index of your website. Some important suggestions for site navigation:

1. Avoid using flash at main page.
2. Addition of keyword related text based navigation should be added to the bottom of all pages.
3. Using Sitemap
4. Avoid using image based navigation

Image ‘alt’ Attribute for Search Engine Optimization

Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

1. Do not use more than 2-3 keywords per page
2. Describe the image and don’t just list the keywords.

Link Popularity

Link popularity is how many other websites are pointing to your website. If you have 199 Web pages pointing to your domain, then your link popularity is 199. Link popularity varies because each engine indexes the web differently. Ideally you would want a minimum of several hundred links per search engine, back to your website; but actual figures depend on the number of links held by your competition.



About Author:

Junaid Ashraf is the SEO Manager in eNet Technologies – www.enettechnologies.com. Website Design and Search Engine Optimization Company.