So, you have just launched your new website and everything is looking good. There is one problem though — no traffic! If you are selling a product or service, you cannot expect to make any sales without people visiting your website.
The two ways people try to obtain links are through paid advertisement and non-paid advertisement. Paid advertisement includes things such as banners on the sides of other websites, paying to be a sponsor at an event, being listed in Google AdWords — which, by the way, will allow you to be listed on the side of search results pages, etc. However, there are some cons. One of the problems with this is that it can cost your company/website a lot of money before you see any return. On top of the cost, most of these advertisements are not very effective. How many times have you actually clicked on advertisements on a website? I bet it’s not that often.
The best non-paid advertisement… Search Engines
Why? It’s where the people are going. Have you ever heard of the term, “Just Google it!” This is referring to looking things up on Google to find an answer to their problem. Nowadays, instead of looking things up in a dictionary, people will look up the facts on search engines. There are over 12 billion searches a month on search engines. That’s about 10 searches per month for every individual that has internet access. This is huge!
As an example, Surpass Hosting wants to be known for web hosting. Therefore we have linked the words web hosting to the primary web hosting page of our site.
So, here’s what we know so far — the people flock to search engines to get their questions answered. So what? How does this affect you? Well, the fact of the matter is that search engines also have a higher click though rate. This means that people are more likely to purchase or subscribe if you are at the top of the search engines for your term. Let’s look at the facts:
- Natural search engine results have about two times as much visibility as paid advertisements on the same page, which means people will see the natural results before the paid ones.
- Natural results have up to twice as much action rates. This simply means you will get about twice as many clicks, orders, subscriptions, etc. when compared to the same link being in an advertisement.
- Finally, people who search with search engines commonly are in the upper to mid income range. People in this category are more likely to have some extra moolah to spend on something they are looking for in the search results.
Which Search Engine Should you Optimize for?
This can be a tough situation sometimes, but for most it is an easy decision…Google. Why? Well, most people go to Google. At the moment, Google owns about 60% of the search engine market share while Yahoo falls in second with about 20%, and Bing is in third at 10%.
Where to Start
For many, it can be very challenging trying to rank for search engines. It is an advanced topic and requires a bit of patience to get started. If I were to start with anything, it would be to make sure you have your keyword listed on your site in at least a few places. Think about it like this, if you want your website to rank at the top of the search engines for your company’s name (your keyword being your company name), you should have your company’s name listed throughout the website. This is the bare minimum to getting your site to rank for a specific term.
From there you can do things such as getting links to your site, making sure some of the headers on your site contain your keyword, or adding meta data to your site. These are advanced topics that we will get into another time. Until then, please leave a comment if you have any questions, or simply “Google it!”
– David P.
David P. is a Web Developer for SurpassHosting.com, Inc. and has been in the web design and search engine optimization industry for the past seven years learning several web based languages along the way such as PHP, MySQL, HTML, and Javascript.
Which search engine do you optimize for? Do you use paid advertisement or non-paid advertisement? Let us know at our Facebook Page, our Twitter, or by sounding off in the comments below!