SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation
This is the method of optimising a site in order for it to gain naturally good rankings in search engines. Unfortunately, some people think SEO is some ‘black hat’ art that is perhaps between African witchcraft and homeopathic medicine. Others, thankfully the more enlightened, see SEO as a ‘White Hat’ art, which with careful processes can quite easily create high natural rankings.
Purepages currently SEO manages a number of sites for clients with exceptionally good results. We do not guarantee our listings because this is impossible, and other web companies that do offer a guarantee with their SEO are seriously misleading the customer. They may, of course, use ‘Black Hat’ artistry, but this is always short lived and doomed to fail in the long run. We take the view that there are a number of criteria to consider when deciding how effective SEO will be
Is your site is under one year old?
Does your site have a strong incoming link from a content related website?
Has your site has been excluded from search engines for whatever reason?
Have you been the victim of a paid incoming link?
Has another SEO/web company performed bad SEO techniques in the past?
When searching for ‘accident solicitors bolton’ on Google #1 www.fordlegal.co.uk
Some Processes in basic SEO work
1. Sitemaps – considered very important in Google ranking requirements, especially if the sitemap is constructed in machine readable HTML code.
2. Tags – There are a plethora of tags to be considered and optimised wherever possible. In essence each page should be titled and tagged differently to others.
3. Backlinks – backlinks from relevant websites over 1 year old and preferably with a page ranking of 3 or above are extremely useful in pulling up your own ranking.
When searching for ‘used audi’ on Google Page1 www.usedaudi.co.uk
The site is competing against massive opposition for this crucial search term
PPC or Pay Per Click
PPC is a methodology generally used when your website is brand new and your organic search ranking is below Page2 of Google or worse. However, some major Internet retailers, for example, Amazon, Chemist Direct, will use PPC all the time as a way of bringing in traffic from the more obscure search terms.
The market for PPC is dominated by Google with their Adwords advertising platform, referred to by Google as ‘sponsored links’ (see diagram below). In essence Google attached a price or cost to a particular search term, say ‘house insurance’. If someone searches for ‘house insurance’ on Google, the consumer may choose to click on one of the many Adwords ads on the right-hand side of the results page. The phrase could cost the company using Adwords up to around £5 for every person clicking on their particular advert. Other companies selling less glamorous products, buckets for example, will only pay perhaps 10pence per click through of their advert that markets and sells buckets over the Internet.
Purepages’ Adwords qualified digital team offers very reasonable Adwords management packages and send reports on a monthly basis to show how effective the Adwords campaigns are. We offer advice on the pages that your customers are landing on to improve ROI. We also send a full report on how the website is performing throughout the month, which pages are visited the most often and the all-important bounce rate (that is how often people land on a page and click back off your site) on the site.
Although much of our SEM / SEO work is Northwest based, we offer services to the whole of the UK. You are very welcome to come and see us or, alternatively, we will come to see you. We like to think that we offer a more personal approach to website design and SEO work.
Some Terms used in Everyday SEO / SEM Processes
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation
The process of optimising a website in order to gain natural listings in the major search engines, at the time of writing this, 85% of the websites visited in the world are found through a search engine.
SEM or Search Engine Marketing
This is the method of promoting a site, either through natual listings or Adwords, this also involves campaigns to promote through the web in other means. Some common promotional methods are banners, videos and Adwords.
PPC or Pay Per Click
Pay per click is generally Adwords, although it can also mean that you put a banner on someone else website and you get charged if someone clicks that banner on their website. It simply means you pay every time someone clicks your advert.
PR or Page Rank
Page Rank is a system that Google uses to determine the importance of a website, when you start doing SEO work you find yourself addicted to this number and want to make it grow at every chance. In serious terms, it is not all that important to SEO. Page Rank is calculated on a number of different variables.
· The age of the website
· The number of content related incoming links the website has
· The value of the content
· How often the site content is updated
