Getting Results in Google
Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ has just released a report that summarizes the opinions of 37 different SEO industry contributors on the different ranking factors for achieving success in Google. It’s a great reference document and well worth reviewing and keeping to hand.
One of our clients, Oz Kit Homes, used these principles to move their website from not being listed in the top 10 pages to being on page 1 for the search term ”kit homes”.
According to the study, the top 10 positive factors that effect Google rankings are:
And the top 5 negative factors that can be detrimental to your ranking efforts are:
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) the basics
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is becoming a very popular way to drive traffic to your website. But it can also be a valuable research tool. I don't think that it should replace good search engine optimisation but merely enhance it.
The most common form of SEM is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and the most commonly used PPC advertising is Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. These PPC Ads are the “sponsored links” you see in Google and the “sponsored results” you see in Yahoo. The nice thing about PPC is that you can control it and you can get instant results and feedback.
When you set up a PPC campaign, you choose what key words you want your ad to appear for and how much you are willing to pay per click. All the ads that are set to come up for that key word are ranked by cost per click, so the higher you set your cost, the higher your ad appears in the sponsored links. You then set a daily budget of your maximum total spend and once your budget is reached, your ads won't show until the next day when your budget is reset. You can also set geographical regions where your ad will be shown so you don't waste your marketing budgets on people outside of the areas where you do business.
For example you can set up a campaign for the key words “interactive marketing” with $0.15 per click and a budget of $20 per day to be shown only in Australia and within hours you can start tracking your results.
There are 2 valuable metrics that you get back from your campaign, impressions (the number of people who see your ad) and the number of people who click on your ad to get to your website. This gives a third valuable metric of a click through rate.
The overall aim is to drive as much targeted traffic to your website, by increasing the number of impressions and click through rate through the choice of good keywords, a well written and target ad and a significant cost per click to show your ad in one of the top places.
No Guarantees with Search Engine Optimisation
I am often asked when talking to clients if I can guarantee that they will be at the top of the search engines, and I am quite quick to say no. There are many companies out that do make promises about getting your site to number 1, but beware of the risks.
Last week I met with a client that had already spent several thousand dollars with two different companies that promised them results and on both occasions failed to deliver. This client is in an industry where his market does all their research on line, so it was very important for him to be near the top.
I made it quite clear to him that we would help his site get to the top and explained the process that we would take, but I also made it clear that it may take some time and there are no guarantees. I then found out that his biggest competitor that was at the top of Google was blacklisted by Google yesterday (also know as Google Death). This means that as far as Google is concerned that site no longer exists, and is due to using methods to try and “trick” Google into ranking you higher. This is also known as Black Hat search engine optimisation.
White Hat optimisation by contrast, is about optimising the site using best practice web design and development methods in conjunction with getting quality sites within the same topic area to link to you. Sounds easy…. but very time consuming.
It's important to understand that the main objective of a search engine is to provide the most relevant websites based on the terms that you are searching for. While it is a little more complicated than this, ultimately to get good search engine results you need
1. to have a website that has lots of content on the topics of your keywords and
2. lots of inbound links from websites within those same topics areas that the search engines have already decided are quality sites
Black Hat techniques may give better shorter term results but the down side of blacklisting is far too great a risk. White Hat techniques require more work, but the results last a lot longer.
