In retail, position and passing trade are critical. On the Web, search engine positions and the traffic resulting from searches are equally so. There are two effective ways you can attract traffic to your Web site:

• Organic search engine optimisation (SEO) - methodologies designed to increase traffic to Web sites by achieving high positions in search engine results

• Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) – sometimes called Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and carried out through services like Google Adwords

How does Organic SEO work?

The principle behind Search Engines is simple. They help people find the content they’re looking for. In order to list all the relevant pages in response to a search, the engines send out search engine spiders to read as many Web sites as they can discover. The content they find is then analyzed by the engine’s indexer.

In essence, SEO makes it easy for the search engines to find content on your web site, ensures the content is written in a way that it will be indexed effectively, and shows the search engine the relative importance of your site when compared to its peers.

At the Web Positioning Centre, we use both Managed and Viral Linking techniques. In Managed Linking, links are requested from trusted sources of known quality; in Viral Linking, articles are written that are attractive to other webmasters and distributed. The articles include a link back to the client’s site.

Is your SEO ethical?

Many SEO companies and SEO consultants persevere with outdated methodologies – or just plain rule-bending strategies, often called Black Hat. Either can lead to penalties being imposed on your site, or even your site being banned totally from one or more search engines. It can take many months or more to get reinstated – but only after the owner has demonstrated that the site has been completely reworked to bring it within the rules.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click advertising is carried out through services like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Adwords places small advertisements to the right (and sometimes to the top) of search results on Google, and on Web sites signed up to the Google Content Network and Adsense programme – you can spot these as they have ‘Ads by Goooooooogle’ in one corner of the advertisement area.

In PPC advertising you only pay when your advertisement is clicked on and someone is taken to your Web site. This means your advertisement may be shown hundreds of times, but you are only charged for the people who are interested enough to click on it.

If you are looking for a consultant to set up and/or run your PPC campaign, Google’s Advertising Professional qualification is widely recognised as proof of a supplier’s experience and expertise.

Organic SEO vs Pay Per Click

The case for Organic SEO - In general, we believe Organic SEO methods are a better investment than Pay Per Click (PPC) services. One of the weaknesses of PPC is that any investment in clicks is transitory. You pay for it and it’s gone. A similar investment in a well-focused content and linking strategy will yield a long-lasting improvement in your site’s SEO performance, and a consequent increase in traffic.

The case for Pay Per Click - Pay Per Click gives you immediate, targeted traffic to your site. This is particularly important for a new site on a new domain, where Google will almost certainly ignore it for around nine months or more – this is often referred to as the Google Sandbox.

While the sandbox should not be used as a reason not to invest in Organic SEO – you will fully benefit from all the linking that has been done on your behalf as soon as you site is released from the sandbox – it does mean that the gradual building of page position that you will see on other major search engines, will not be seen on Google.

While organic results are being built, Pay Per Click can give you the traffic you need. The impact is immediate – although the campaign will need to be managed and evolved over time for the best returns.

The right approach for you

Applying SEO and SEM most effectively involves using a bespoke approach to each site. Every competitive environment is different, as is a site’s current search engine performance. So an off-shelf approach is rarely a sensible investment.

You should expect a professional SEO consultancy to write you a clearly planned strategy as a key stage in their work for you, before proceeding to implementation. While no ethical SEO will make a guarantee of performance, you should proceed with an agreed and fully understood rationale.

By David Rosam, Head of SEO Copywriting and Google Qualified Advertising Professional (http://tinyurl.com/84ywq), Web Positioning Centre

Website: http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk
Blog: http://dangerous-thinking.com
E-mail: david@webpositioningcentre.co.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)70 440 76726
Skype: davidrosam