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The Internet has been considered by many as the major innovation of our
time. Organic and life-like, it acts much like a huge information library
or messaging system, moving information from a source to a destination
at the speed of light. Unlike an encyclopedia, however, there is no
assurance that the information is correct, is legal to use, or has
value. Anyone can put anything out there. How Can the Search Engine Optimization Help Me?The basic business of using the search engines to market information, products, or just to accomplish your mission is called search engine marketing, or SEM. The topic has two basic branches – paid search marketing, and organic (or free) search engine marketing. The major search engine is Google, with both Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bling yipping at Google’s heels trying to catch up.With a given search engine, searchers should be able to identify which results are paid ads and which are free. With Google, the paid ads are at the very top of the listing with a colored background and also down the right side. The free ads are on the page starting after the paid ads at the top. Paid search marketing is just that. You pay the search engine company to display an advertisement for your company. The advertisement is keyed to your keyword phrase or phrases. When a searcher uses that phrase to search the engine, your advertisement is prominently displayed in the result page. The search engine may charge you based on several factors such as the competition for your keyword phrase, the number of times the advertisement is displayed, how near the top of the list you want your advertisement displayed, and/or based on how many times the potential customer clicked through to your site. The organic results are free and your site will probably eventually start showing up there even if you do absolutely nothing. You don’t submit your site to the search engine for the organic results. Instead, the search engine finds you based on links from other sites. You can upload your web site and put it on the internet, but Google has no way of finding you unless its index program comes into your site from a link on another site that is already indexed on Google. This means links to your site on the internet are very important. Links are the currency of the web. In the early days of Google, positioning was much simpler. The more links into your site, the better your listing. People would pay other sites to get links into their sites, trick the system with links from the owner’s multiple sites, and play all kinds of games to position themselves well. Those days are gone now. Links are still the currency of the web, but Google wants to see links coming into your site from trusted sites – sites that already have a high value on the Internet, are drawing lots of traffic, and add content value to your site. A link from your kid’s personal site has far, far less value that a link from cnn.com. There is a real art for getting your site to work well in the organic search engines. Suppose you published a book and now you put a news release on your site and wait for the reporters for the mass media to find your release and give you so free publicity. Dream on. The reporter doesn’t care about your book. Today it is necessary to take a different route. That reporter wants stories. He (or she) is using the internet search engines to find stories. Give the reporter a story – a story from your book or about writing that book. Now the reporter will find it and you have the publicity. Paid or Organic Advertising?As a general rule, I prefer the organic listing. Part of the reason I prefer the organic results is not they are free, but that I feel they can be trusted more than the sponsored listings. One of top sponsored advertisements on the CNN site (with its ads from the Yahoo engine) for awhile was from a company that has very questionable ethics and moral values. When I asked Yahoo about this (they provided CNN’s ads), Yahoo said they were only the messenger, not the message. The real message from Yahoo though, is that you can’t trust their advertisers because they could pay whatever was necessary to get that position. In the case of this CNN page, all of the advertisements were from Yahoo at the time and paid. For searching, I’d give priority to the organic results in the search engines. This is why 80% of the clicks from the search engines go to the organic listings. Quality organic listings, however, can be however, more work and time to get a good position in them. And, in some cases, paid listings can do a better job for you. It depends on the situation.
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