Search Engine Marketing Explained
If you are new to the Internet or to search engine marketing, then you may be overwhelmed with the hordes of information that is available to you. This "information overload" can frustrate even the sharpest business owner. We'd like to break this information down and summarize the basics of search engine marketing and explain it to you.
There may be several terms that are new to you so let's quickly go over them. Below is a picture to help identify the different areas that I am referring to.
1) *PPC - Pay per click. This is a method used by people who do not want to wait for the time it takes to get natural search engie results. You will see these results at the top, right side, and sometimes the bottom of the SERPS (search engine result pages.) This holds true for all the "Big 3"; Google, Yahoo, and Bing (MSN). These listings say "Sponsored Search" above them. The Sponsored search on the top are usually the top 1-3 bidders, while those on the right side and bottom are normally positions 4-10...but they are all PPC managed under Google Adwords (or Yahoo & Bing when reffeering to them).
Google has a program called "Adwords" that allows people to pay a certain amount for each click. The higher you bid, the higher your results are, although Google has recently moved to a slightly more complicated method which includes keyword "Quality Score".
Quality Score is where Google Bot analyze your web pages to determine relavancy on top of taking your keyword bid into consideration. With all that being said, the top PPC or Sponsored listings are still most likely going to be the people bidding the highest. Using the example "Pensacola Accountant", below you can see the people's websites who are using PPC and paying for each individual click for this term. In the picture below, the Google Adwords, which are the PPC/ Sponsored search results are labeled under #1 and #4.
2) *Local Business Results or Local Search Listings - Local search listings can be Gold because they are free and they actually appear above or on top of the natural search engine results! If you have a business in a certain city or cities then you need to make sure that you are showing up on Google Local. Sticking with the same example, let's say that you are an accountant in Pensacola, Florida. You should make sure that your business is in these listings or you are missing out on potential customers. The Local business results in the picture above are labeled #2.
3) *Natural Search engine optimization - The process of designing your web page(s) with the proper html coding, keyword density, and backlinks to achieve top ranking in the natural search engine results pages (SERPS). The natural search engine results in Google for the term "Pensacola Accountant", are labled under the #3 in the picture above.