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Natural Search Engine Optimization Delivering Results
If you're tired of looking at page after page of search engine results before you see your company website, then you should read this article. Learn how top marketers are using Natural Search Optimization to deliver traffic to their websites.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO seems to be the latest buzzword with companies springing from all corners of the World claiming to have "The Secrets to Ranking #1 in Searches." Just pay them $2,500, no $5,000, no $10,000 and they will craft their magic within your meta-tags, conjure a potion of keywords and cast a spell on Google, Yahoo!, AOL and the rest of the search engines making your website the most relevant in existence.
The fact is there are no simple one-step solutions that you can employ and expect the click-throughs to find you. SEO takes planning, resources, measurement and reaction.
There are two types of search engine marketing, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Natural or Organic SEO. The latter type is free in the sense that you don't pay when someone clicks-through, but you can't completely control your relevance ranking (How high you rank) by 'out-bidding' your competitors. That said, effective Natural Search Optimization continues to deliver greater results that PPC even as PPC costs-per-click rise briskly.
The annual industry survey of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) found that natural search optimization was still the most popular form of search engine marketing, with nearly 75% of advertisers using this method.
SEMPO researchers also predict that search engine marketing spend will continue to grow, doubling by 2011 to reach an aggregate spending total of $18.6 million. As we see costs per click continue to rise (check in at Performics.com later this month for the latest Performics 50 index), marketers increasingly turn to NSO to acquire more low-cost traffic and decrease the average per-click cost of search traffic.
In his address at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit last month, InterActiveCorp (IAC) chairman/ CEO Barry Diller commented on the growing value of effective natural search optimization (NSO).
Zachary Rodgers of ClickZ News reported, "Diller sang the praises of IAC's "resident geniuses" of search engine optimization, and said SEO's contribution to the firm's traffic acquisition efforts can't be understated. When the company transferred an SEO expert from its Expedia division to CitySearch, he claimed the site's unique user count jumped from six million to over 20 million per month "without spending a nickel. That's great value."
The bottom line? Most organizations need their marketing department or top executives to champion the NSO cause to set the stage for success. This type of organizational support and a strong SEO expert partner can generate impressive, cost-effective, and highly targeted traffic through NSO.
NSO teams need control
Pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing grew so quickly, in part, because advertisers directly control their ads' visibility in the search results. NSO, on the other hand, requires that marketers collaborate with PR, Sales, Management, Web developers, and their various agencies to maintain momentum and consistently act on measured results. Champions within each functional area need to understand the opportunity, collaborate to overcome obstacles, and institute change.
Giving NSO teams and professionals the ability to test and retest copy is a good example. Driving more natural-search visitors on strategic keywords requires finding the right combination of keywords, usage, and placement through trial-and-error and ongoing optimization. This is a long-term effort, not a one-time fix. In our experience, a minimum eight- to 12-week Web production cycle is needed to produce meaningful results and generate sustainable momentum.
How can you use richer looking content and SEO?
First, you must eliminate natural-search visibility issues by overcoming the engines' inability to index such technologies as Flash, Java, and AJAX. Such content optimization hurdles and site structure issues frequently prevent search engine crawlers from finding pages. One successful tactic is creating search-engine-friendly URLs through mirror Web pages, allowing you to directly optimize page content and test content and structure alterations. Another solution that marketers can directly control to increase natural search visibility, enables marketers to feed their Web pages and associated content to search engines which helps overcome content visibility hurdles.
As marketers increasingly invest in content and branded rich Internet applications, the stakes of effective NSO continue to rise. If you build it in Flash or without visible content, they will not come. or you will have to pay for every visitor. NSO can drive huge numbers of low-cost visitors.
For more information on our Natural Search Engine Optimization capabilities, click here. |
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