Philadelphia Website Articles - The Quick Guide to Search Engine Advertising (text only) CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION What will I learn from this guide? This short guide has two simple goals: 1) Introduce the two types of website listings displayed after conducting a search on Yahoo, Google, MSN, or other search engine. Namely: • Natural Listings Natural listing are based on merit. That is, the quality of material your website presents. The search engine will try to place the best websites at the top of the each respective search results listing based on each website’s content. • Artificial Listings (Pay-Per-Click or PPC) Artificial listings are purchased on a pay-per-click basis through online services such as Overture (owned by Yahoo) and AdWords (owned by Google). 2) Detail several reasons why pay-per-click offers a better return-on-investment than natural placement: Flexibility People who search the Internet are using a wide variety of search keywords and phrases relating to you product or service. PPC lets you author a unique advertisement for each. Control PPC lets you control, on-the-fly, exactly where, and how frequently, each targeted advertisement appears. You can view reports detailing your return-on-investment at any time. Low Starting Cost PPC doesn’t require you to optimize or submit your website (which can be a large cost savings). Responsive Your ads can appear within days of your site going live. Coverage The two PPC players, Overture (owned by Yahoo), and AdWords (owned by Google) insure your ads are displayed in 85%-90% of all search engines. Regional You can focus your PPC advertisements for a specific region. You don’t have to pay the high cost of national advertising if you sell only locally. Cost Pay-per-click ads typically cost less than a direct mail postcard on a cost-per-lead basis. What won’t I learn from this guide? This guide does not detail, for example: - How to achieve a high natural search engine ranking - How to select the best target keywords or phrases - Pay-per-click advertisement design or bidding strategies - The various pay-per-click and site submission services offered by Overture. - Why you should use Stone Rose Design’s search engine related services. This is an informational guide only, not an advertisement. CHAPTER 2 - A few search engine facts It’s a very rare exception to find an Internet user who has not tried, for one reason or another, tried various search engines such as Yahoo, Google, or MSN. In fact it’s so rare that the number of daily searches performed on the most popular search engines is staggering. What are these people searching for? One of the reasons for this large number of searches is simply that folks usually don’t get it right the first time. Even veteran Internet users typically need more than one search attempt, trying a similar or more specific phrase, to find what they want. For a simple example consider the person who wants to purchase a Philadelphia Eagles team hat. Here’s one possible diary of the successive searches that person might pursue. 1) Search for “Eagles”...and find sites for the music group, endangered birds, and perhaps hundreds of teams with “eagle” in the name. 2) Search again, this time for “Philadelphia Eagles”...resulting in a wide variety of sites...links to news articles, the team’s own website, the NFL’s website perhaps, and maybe even articles about eagles in the philadelphia zoo. 3) Search again for “Philadelphia Eagles hats”...resulting in hundreds of online stores selling both NFL team hats and nature oriented hats. In other words, most searches attempted are not unique but variations on a theme. As we’ll detail later, pay-per-click ads let you write advertisements that focus on each one of the search term variations that people try en-route to their end result. How many search engines are there? Technically speaking, a search engine is any website that allows you to conduct a search for webpages or other online information. (There’s actually much more than webpages out there.) That said there are probably over one million search engines HREF="../ilable on the net. Most you’ve never heard of, and probably few have used). What are the top search engines? Despite the large number of search engines out there (and seemingly as many email offers to submit your website to all of them for $19.95) Yahoo and Google continue to account for over 70% of search engine searches: Which search results listings get clicked the most? If you’re in the market for golf balls you’re in luck...Yahoo lists over one and one quarter million websites for “golf balls” which are displayed twenty on a page. According to several “web watch” groups, the chances of any ad being clicked on the second search results page is one-tenth of those on the first page. The third page is one-tenth of that, etc, etc. This is why it’s very important to understand that the cost to achieve a high natural placement can be far more than a pay-per-click advertisement on the first page of search results. CHAPTER 3 - Natural Search Engine Placement Each search engine has its own proprietary set of criteria for evaluating and ranking webpages. If the search engine offers a paid advertising program, such as Yahoo and Google, this criteria is regularly changed to thwart third-party businesses from being able to manipulate site rankings. But regardless of the methods used, each search engine’s goal is to determine two things: 1) How well does the webpage detail what it’s about? 2) Do others think it’s a good page? (That is, how many other sites that link to that page. This is called “link popularity”.) Search engines rank pages by evaluating both the information presented to the site visitor as well as the behind-the-scenes HTML programming used to control the display the text and graphics that the visitor sees. This process is call “natural placement” because it relies solely on the webpage’s content. Achieving a high natural ranking is typically a recursive process taking numerous iterations of optimization and re-evaluation to achieve a high natural ranking. Depending on the number of target keywords and phrases this can become a costly process. How do search engines find your website? There are two ways a search engine learns about your website. • Automatic Submission When you purchased your websites domain name....whatever-dot-com or dot-net, etc, it gets added to a list of all websites which, eventually, get evaluated by the major search engines. To speed up the process use manual submission. • Manual Submission Once your site is complete you can manually submit it to each search engine’s “submit your site here” page or purchasing a service* that can perform that service for you. * Be very wary of search engine submission services. The far majority over services you really don’t need or can be performed far more affordably. A few weeks, on average, after you submit your website, the search engine’s special software visits your website and reads, or to be technically exact, “crawls” your website using “spidering software”. How does each search engine rank your website? Most search engines use a very sophisticated scoring algorithm to evaluate what each webpage is trying to say and if it does it better or worse than other pages detailing the same topic. In Google’s own words, “Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” And this applies to other search engines as well. They are all interested in providing the most relevant search results for any given search attempt. This is not as good as it sounds because if each search engine uses a unique ranking method than trying to optimize your website for one search engine, say Yahoo, might actually compromise your ranking in another search engine, say Google. But regardless of the specific ranking algorithm, here’s a quick overview of the website traits a search engine likes to see. DEDICATED PAGES Each webpage should focus on a single topic, keyword, or phrase. Webpages that attempt to present information about multiple subjects “dilute” the value of each and have a lower ranking than those that detail a single subject. This is one of the reasons pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is so much more cost effective than natural placement. With natural placement the more you try to optimize the return for a particular keyword or phase the more you’ll compromise the ranking for other related terms (which in total may have much more advertising value than the most popular search term). With PPC you can enjoy a top ranking, often at a low cost-per-click, for each and every keyword or phrase you’d like to target. One of the ways a search spider figures this out is by reading your webpages is to read each one just as a visitor would...sentence by sentence. If it can easily figure out what product or service the page is detailing and that it does so in good-faith then it receives a good score for content. If on the other hand the search engine determines there is some possibility that the webpage author is trying to unfairly earn a higher ranking by, for example, often repeating the target keyword— called “keyword spamming” — a penalty is accessed. How many times is too many? 25?...for sure...10?...probably....5?...maybe/maybe not because search engines aren’t telling. CLEAN HTML Website design software (and web designers if they’re good) use the webpage formatting language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to dictate a webpage’s text and graphic elements. HTML works by using “tags”, which really are just separators, which tell the web browser the details of each text or graphic element. For example, if your webpage needed to display a string of text, like “Dimples help make a golf ball fly straight.” the actual HTML code might look like this (HTML shown in bold): <font face=arial size=2>Dimples help make a golf ball fly straight.</font> Many HTML tags also have provisions to insert comments about the respective webpage element and search engines evaluate those as well. META TAGS Meta tags contain website information not displayed to a visitor (except for the title meta tag which displays the webpage title). Two of these meta tags provide search engine specific information, namely, a list of keywords and a description of the page’s contents. In other words the meta tags let you sleave additional comments for the search engines to read. There three most relevant search engine related meta tags detail the title, name, and description. Here’s a very simple set of meta tags: <title>Golf Balls. Buy Golf Balls Online</title> <meta name="keywords" content="golf, balls, online, used, golfball"> <meta name="description" content="The Best Used Golf Balls Around. All brands. Best pricing.”> Meta-tags are not the most important contributor to a high ranking. In fact some search engines, at one time or another, practically ignore the meta tags there is so much rampant abuse in order to gain an unfair edge. LINK POPULARITY If you have a good webpage, and it’s been on the web a while, it’s likely others would link to it to share your great information. This is the theory behind “link popularity”, a method many search engines use in the ranking process. Google, for example, creates what is calls a “PageRank Index” based on this popularity, from 0 to 10, which rates each page’s popularity. Any web browser with a Google search bar utility installed can display the PageRank Index. (http://toolbar.google.com/) But here’s the rub about “link popularity”...they have to be the right kind of “quality” links. Simply trading links with another site doesn’t count, in fact it might count against you, as the act of trading is simply a strategy to unfairly increase rankings. Search engines are very sensitive to this issue, in fact any issue, when it comes to trying to achieve a high ranking by mis-portraying your website. CHAPTER 3 - Artificial Search Engine Placement (Pay-Per-Click, PPC) Chapters 3 describes the natural method of designing and optimizing a webpage for maximum ranking the the recursive process necessary to earn and maintain a high ranking. This chapter focuses on purchasing search Engine Advertising through service such as Overture and AdWords. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising can be done concurrent to optimizing your website for natural placement and offers a variety of cost, time, and quality advantages. How does pay-per-click compare to natural placement? Where do pay-per-click ads appear? After you perform a website search the search results page lists the relevant websites. The pay-per-click advertisements are displayed in the sections typically labeled SPONSORED LINKS or SPONSORED RESULTS. How do I purchase pay-per-click ads? There are two major players in the PPC world: Overture, owned by Yahoo, and AdWords, owned by Google. It would take a much larger guide than this just to explain all the differences between them, but for most small businesses that is probably moot at both are inexpensive enough to try for at least a three to six month trial period. When should you use pay-per-click? The instant your website goes live. As the monthly budget for a PPC campaign can be less than one or two hours of web design time it should be used concurrently with a natural optimization (Chapters 2 and 3) strategy to provide the maximum return on investment. What about all the “tire-kickers” that click my ad who really don’t want what I’m selling? If your ad is too generic you’ll get many clicks from folks who are visiting your site to find out more. Simply creating a very specific ad, especially in the ad title, greatly reduces the tire-kicker effect.