Search Engine Optimization

One of the most crucial factors in optimizing your website for search engines, is the building of valuable links.  When Google’s search algorithms index a site, they instantaneously compute the number of Web sites that link to your own site, and they calculate the value of each link respectively.  This process is automatically performed literally millions of times each day.  Search Engines believe that calculating links and taking into account such things as what each link says, along with the overall quality of the websites they come from, is an effective method of determining a sites presence or authority.  Google ranks Web sites based on how prominent and dominant they are in their respective fields or markets.  The absolute foundation of the Google search engine is to determine authority of sites, and to deliver the consumer the most relevant results.

denver seo,denver internet marketing,denver web development

Basically, the more quality Web sites that link to your site, the better you will do in Google’s organic results.  On the other hand, if you obtain only a few links, you will most certainly need to improve your presence in the eyes of Google.  In order to optimize your site, you must learn how to effectively build links to your Web site so that the search engines will determine your site as an authority and rank it accordingly.

The very first step in effectively building links is to evaluate your existing competition.  Whatever is working for your strongest competitors, can definitely work for you as well.  In the beginning stages of link-building, your sights should be set on building a foundation for an effective Denver search engine optimization business plan.  Seriously take a look at your competition and evaluate them so you know how to best spend the time necessary to rank higher and build up a strong Internet presence in your market.

Remember that not all links are created equally, so you should evaluate the quality of each potential link partner.  By analyzing several link-quality factors, you can more effectively decide which links to focus on.  The analyzation of llink quality will most certainly help give you direction in you Denver Internet marketing plans.  By directing your attention to more quality links, you are more likely to be recognized by major search engines as a contributor of quality subject matter and content.  You can save yourself a lot of time if you pursue the process of building quality links as opposed to a large quantity of links.  You do not need thousands of links all over the Web to rank well with search engines.  For optimal success, you should approach link building from the standpoint of quality over quantity.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Cade, excited at Christmas about some new socks

By: Cade Lee

Completely new to Twitter (at least only having been there for the past couple of weeks now), I have never been so enthused about a new social networking media. I have been on facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sits but I have to say that I have run into more people in a shorter time frame on Twitter than anything else so far. So with that being said, I was asked by GreigWells (@GreigWells on Twitter) to conduct this post and I was happy to do so. I had never really considered the three types of marketing separate or “versus” one another before, nonetheless GriegWells requested a SWAT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Achievements and Threats also referred to as SWOT, O for opportunities) assessment on the these three internet marketing techniques. In trying to remain objective I must state that I am a strong believer in “search engine optimization” and that includes using all three of the above campaigns for marketing online. I definitely lean more towards traditional search engine optimization and social networking versus pay per click (cost per click) advertising and I will explain this very shortly. So with that being said, let’s begin.

Pay per Click (PPC, CPC)

For those that have not heard this before or are completely new to internet marketing, these are the advertisements that you see on the right hand side of your screen or at the very top of your Google internet marketing and already know this so bear with me for a few seconds while I explain to those who do not know. PPC or CPC advertising is paid for by the advertiser. In a pay per click campaign you will set up an account with whatever search engine you are advertising with, you will “buy” or define keywords that searchers would use to find your product or service and then bid on those keywords. Depending on your bid, you will show up on the 1^st page or perhaps the 5^th  depending on how you bid. You can control the amount of money that you spend on these types of campaigns by defining a daily budget and how much you are willing to pay for the keywords defined in your campaign.

Organic listings are bordered in blue while PPC is highlighted and bordered in Red. Our next figure will be easier "which one of these kids is doing his own thing".

searches. Usually you will notice a “sponsored links” text by these advertisements. I know that many of you have much experience in

Strengths, Achievements: With PPC or CPC advertising you are able to achieve a very high page ranking (as long as you bid high) at a very fast pace or in a very short time frame. You do not really have to work at obtaining high amounts of traffic to your site, it is extremely convenient and time efficient.

So PPC or CPC goes in line with the golden rule, you know, “He/she who has the most gold makes the rules”. You simply pay enough and you are in front of all that coveted “front page” traffic that everyone is after, as long as you have followed the terms and conditions of the search engine that you have placed the campaign with.  

It has been documented in some studies that PPC/CPC advertising attracts 14% of the overall traffic; however, when you consider the sheer volume of some keywords 14% can add up to tens of thousands of searches every day. There are other studies that have shown PPC/CPC obtaining a total of 30% of total traffic. So while it is hard to say just how many searchers trust or look to PPC/CPC to find the solution for their search, pay per click advertising does deliver results and for many companies (especially newer domains or sites) it is a necessity.

Threats/Weaknesses: Man it was certainly tough to cover the strengths and I had to bite my tongue to get here. Threats and weaknesses to a pay per click campaign are many. To start, once you have initiated your campaign for PPC/CPC and “gotten the ball rolling” you can definitely expect to see traffic, but what kind of traffic? Could it be that your jealous competition is simply clicking on your ad to use your budget for the day? Google and other companies that offer PPC/CPC advertising cannot prevent this type of activity from occurring; although they have put some protocol in place to avoid it as much as possible it is still absolutely going to happen. I don’t necessarily condone this type of behavior (clicking on PPC ads to drive out the competition) but, for those that believe business is war (especially among small to mediums sized businesses) I know that this is a daily occurrence having heard it from the mouths of many prospective customers. At the end of the day spending your competitions budget on PPC is a strategy just like any other. The sooner your competition spends your budget for the day, the sooner they can take your advertisement down and then perhaps if they have an ad of their own, theirs will surface from the bottom of the heap where they have bid a much lower amount for the same keywords you have bid on.

Another weakness to PPC is that once you have spent your budget for the day you are off the “board” unless you are willing to go in and change your budget and spend more money. So in PPC/CPC you are sincerely at the mercy of the market. Whether your ad is visible to that prospective customer you are hoping to meet depends on whether or not your ad has been clicked on enough times to spend your budget for that day. If you think about this, what type of advertising have you ever done in the past where your ad disappears? Maybe with passing out flyers, or television ads, both of these campaigns tend to be just as effective in today’s market as PPC (maybe even more effective in my opinion).

Getting back on topic here, I thought I might mention that keywords in PPC/CPC seem to be less forgiving here than in search engine optimization. I say this because it seems to me that if you have not defined the keyword exactly as it is typed in by your searcher than you will miss that traffic as well. An example of this is “Denver Attorney” versus “Attorney in Denver”. In my experience in the past, if I purchased “Denver Attorney” and did not place “Attorney in Denver” in my campaign, than I would not show for it as a keyword.  Makes sense as Google or any other search engine would not want to take charge of your PPC campaign and just assume that you would want to be in front of that traffic looking for “Attorney in Denver”. Whereas in search engine optimization you will be able to “net” the traffic from misspellings, variations of keywords, etc. I will explain more about this in our assessment of search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

Strengths/Achievements:  It seriously pains me to separate search engine optimization from social networking, but given the request of comparing these three “side by side” I must abide by the rules here. Anyway, search engine optimization for those of you who might have heard the term (who hasn’t latey?), but are new to the concept means that you are optimizing your site in hopes to achieve a page one ranking or improve your ranking in the search results by optimizing the keywords

One of these kids is doing his own thing, can you tell which one? By the way, this has nothing to do with this post.

used within your site as well as making use of meta tags and building links to your site from other credible and relevant sites. As cited earlier, 14% – 30% of traffic (according to some studies) is going to PPC/CPC results which would imply that 70% or more of searchers are going to the organic results. This would only make sense as Google or whatever major search engine that searcher is using has taken the time to find the most relevant site or results for that searchers specified search. There seems to be an inherent amount of trust given to the larger search engines as they have proven over time with their very complex algorithms that they deliver the most trusted and useful results first.  So is it really any wonder that the majority of internet traffic prefers organic results over PPC/CPC results?

In the sites that we manage (we are a search engine optimization firm if I didn’t say that before) we have noticed a lower bounce rate and a higher “lead conversion rate” on our SEO efforts versus the results our customers had achieved through their previous experiences with pay per click campaigns managed by “pay per click” experts. Mind you that some of these customers were using “AdWords qualified professionals” designated so by Google’s very own designation program. In order to qualify for this program (read this) you will read that it is imperative that these professionals have a quota to fulfill before they ever even qualify. This was absolutely amazing to me as I thought Google would want to have the absolute most qualified individuals giving advice on this sort of campaign versus requiring some sort of monthly quota as they have outlined in their requirements.

Okay, okay, back on topic here. Search engine optimization offers stability for those sites which abide by the guidelines stated here. Although Google changes their algorithms and updates their search engine results regularly, I have noticed that by abiding the guidelines set forth and constantly improving our customer’s websites we are able to stay in front of the right prospective customers for the same keywords 24/7 for a myriad of keyword combinations (i.e. “Denver Attorney” versus “Attorney in Denver). So the biggest strengths of SEO (search engine optimization) is that a site has no daily budget concerns because it is free! Also there seems to be more trust among searchers with organic listings and more stability and dependability as far as showing up at “the right time and being in the right place” when that prospective customer is looking for your products or services. Lastly, the conversion rate seems to always be higher with a well optimized site versus only working with PPC traffic.

Threats/Weaknesses: At any given time, when you are depending on search engine optimization for your results, you are at the complete mercy of the search engine. At any given time a search engine can go through an “update” or change their algorithms and not include your site in their new results for various search terms. So you are at the complete mercy of the unknown here. With PPC/CPC as long as you pay your bill, you do not have this concern.

With SEO, there is no such thing as instant gratification and there is no “known” way of obtaining a 1^st page ranking. All SEO experts have usually deomnstrated some sort of ability to achieve these types of results, but even they cannot sincerely guaranty a page one ranking. Perhaps if you are optimizing for a search term like ,”Rodent racing” as used by Peter Kent in “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies” you might see quicker results; however, if you live in the real world it is most likely that there are many competitors vying for that first page result you are looking for. So, there is much competition in search engine optimization not to mention how time consuming it really is. If you are sincere about optimizing your site and obtaining that 1^st page ranking than it is imperative that you work on optimizing your website every day and following an “optimization plan”. I know that there are many other experts out there that would disagree with me, but I sincerely believe that the only way to “white hat” your way to the top is to work earnestly on obtaining that 1^st page ranking every day.

A well optimized site requires regular maintenance, so it is imperative that you continue working on your optimization even when you obtain that 1^st page ranking. PPC/CPC does not require any of this laborious work.

Social Networking

Strengths/Achievements: I strongly believe that social networking differs from PPC/CPC and SEO altogether. If I were to come up with a fair analogy, I view social networking like networking in general.

When I first entered the professional market, I was a sales representative. I trained with a class of other sales representatives and we were taught two basic ways to obtain business. One was through hard work which included marketing, cold calling and basically getting out there in front of strangers. The other way we were taught to obtain new business was in networking. Networking is also hard word, I did not mean to imply that it wasn’t, but it always seemed like so much more fun than cold calling or handing out fliers (I know I used flyers before, who knows both seem acceptable). Social networking online is the same to me as networking. If you can establish you or your company as a trusted source for any particular solution, than when the time is right for the prospect who has been reading your facebook or linked-in page comes, they will contact you (at least that is the hope). These leads are solid as they already know who you are, what you have to say, how many kids you have and where you went to school. These prospects know that they want to do business with you, they have studied your content and they are interested period.

I strongly believe that (personal opinion here) the closing ratio is higher for those businesses and professionals that have obtained leads or prospective customers strictly by networking online versus those who are only using PPC/CPC or SEO. I say this because social networking is more like public relations versus SEO and PPC/CPC which is more in line with advertising. When advertising, it is more likely to get objections from prospective customers about price or value than it is from referrals. I view social networking just like I do networking in real life.

Threats/ Weaknesses: Similar to SEO, with social networking, your ranking and account are always at the mercy of who you have them with. Just as Google has guidelines, so do the majority of social networking sites. So at the end of the day it is not beyond the realm of reason to suggest that the page on linkedin you have been working at so hard to promote goes away over night as they are sold off to a larger competitor or perhaps they change their guidelines and the scope of your page goes against their guidelines now. While my first example might seem more ridiculous (imagine facebook disappearing overnight, right) the second is not so unimaginable. Facebook could change guidelines tomorrow eliminating all references to any commercial product or company within their domain tomorrow if they wanted, and if they did I don’t think they would suffer all that much for it. I am obviously using my imagination here; the point is that anyone depending on social networking is at the mercy of the services they use to network. Take Squidoo for example, many were using this as a way to promote themselves only to have Google disregard the high page rank they had obtained for their Squidoo page and next thing you know they were not visible any longer. The rules can change at any given time.

So, there you have it. The strengths, weaknesses, achievements and threats of SEO versus PPC versus social networking as I see and understand it. Ultimately, I think any professional or company for that matter is insane not to take advantage of all three of these. I am not suggesting that anyone go out and do all three at the same time, but I do believe that the first stage to obtaining good traffic for a new site is through PPC/CPC. I say this because a site that has never been marketed or is newer will not be able to achieve results organically right away (at least not for the long run), so while the search engine optimization campaign is being worked on, PPC/CPC can deliver results immediately.

The second phase of a solid internet marketing plan incorporates search engine optimization and social networking. Both search engine optimization and social networking used hand in hand will deliver the most optimal results for your search engine marketing campaign. First time I used this term right? What is search engine marketing you say? There are several different definitions of this; I am going to give you the meaning I give to search engine marketing. Search engine marketing is any attempt within the “whitehat” world of internet marketing to get a useful message out to the online community about your services or product, period. By making a constant effort to market you, your website and your product or service, I believe you are marketing through the internet and search engines alike.

The third phase of your internet marketing plan should be improvement. Improving traffic, improving conversion goals and education. The internet is obviously changing faster than any of us can keep up with it, so by constantly striving to stay on top of it all and educating yourself on the latest social networking techniques, PPC/CPC and SEO strategies you will be able to keep your traffic and grow.

At the end of the day, any one of these internet marketing techniques is beyond valuable and they have all assisted with the success of thousands of professionals and businesses alike. Used in combination with one another, an explosive internet marketing campaign can be designed for almost anyone.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Written by: Nick Hantge

With today’s shift from paper to major search engines and online directories, a website is one of the best marketing tools a company can have.  A website can reach not only individuals searching for your services or products locally; it can reach hundreds of thousands of individuals nationwide and around the globe.

Whether you sell a product online such as cookies or jewelry or provide a service such as laser hair removal, the first step to being successful online is being found on the major search engines.  It does not matter the size of your company or how great your website looks, if individuals cannot find your business in their searches you simply will not be successful online.

Too often, companies or individuals spend thousands of dollars on the design of their website thinking they are doing the right thing.  This idea of creating a website that just looks good is a thing of the past.  If a website is unable to be found under searches relating to its content, this marketing tool is a waste of your money.

The quickest possible way to get listed on the major search engines is through search engine marketing (SEM) where you pay for quality leads to your website often called Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.  Although PPC does get you immediately listed on search engines, through our research 75% of individuals using the internet do not click on paid advertisements on the side.

A more effective but time intensive way to get noticed by the search engines is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO is the science of analyzing and enhancing your website to manipulate your ranking on major search engines such as Google® and Yahoo!® to increase the volume of traffic to your site.  Since 65% of searches make their decision before moving to the second page, it is vital to have your website optimized and show up for different search terms on the first page at least once.  The more times your website appears under searches relating to your business, obviously the more exposure you have that will ultimately lead to more traffic to your website.  After your website has been optimized and starts to appear on the first page of the search engine for a few terms, then the appearance, flow, and functionality starts to become a factor.  It only makes sense to keep the individuals on your website once they are they.  The longer people are on your website, the more likely they are to use your product or services.

A huge advantage to SEO when it comes to advertising is the quality of the traffic viewing your site.  Most everyone that visits your optimized website is looking either for the product or services you provide.  This quality lead is much better than the traffic you are reaching through a billboard, newspaper, or radio advertisement.  The reason I say that is because the individuals who hear or see that ad, do not necessarily need or want your services.  Plus in these types of advertisements, your information does not stay in front of individuals, whereas a properly optimized website can be found over and over again with your contact information and list of products and services blaring right at them.

There are many techniques that SEO experts use to increase the ranking of websites.  The key to a good SEO campaign is a constant effort.  Web pages need to be added and updated, link building needs to continue while your website remains live, and submissions to all major search engines along with directories are just a few of the many techniques an SEO company would use to help increase a websites rank.  If you would like more information on SEO techniques or strategies, call Iniquitous as (303) 327-8991 or visit their website: Iniquitous

Bookmark It

Hide Sites