When you are starting a website and want to get traffic to your site there are two ways you can do it. Pay for it through online ads – Pay Per Click (PPC) or you can pay for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When you pay for ad space your website will show up on the very top of the page as well as the side of the page. When you use Search Engine Optimization your site shows up in the “organic” search. The obvious benefit of using PPC is that your site gets exposure from day one. When you optimize your site for the keywords you are targeting it takes a while for your website to climb to the top of the page. Let’s go over the data and see which one is better in the long run.

Search Engine Users Behavior

It doesn’t matter which search engine your customers or clients are using, all search engines work relatively the same. 62% of all users are impatient and only look on the first page of search. Because of this you can see that even if your site is on the top of page 2 more than half of the people searching for you won’t ever see your website. Then only 23% of users will click on links after the first page. Even if people go to the second page, not many are even clicking. You can see that being on the first page is critical to your online success.

The good news is some search engines are easier to rank on than others. You can be on page one on Yahoo and Bing and on page 2 or 3 on Google. It’s important to see where you stand on each search engine platform. 15% of search engine users look on other search engines so if you rank well on Google, but not on Yahoo there is a chance that your users will look on other search engines.

Rate of Investment

So now that we have looked at the behavior of users, let’s look at the ROI. When you are starting a new website every penny counts. Your rate of investment is important to look at. When it comes to SEO vs PPC 40% of SEO campaigns yield returns of 500% while this is only true of 22% of PPC campaigns. So when you invest in an SEO campaign your return is going to be better than just focusing on PPC.

As you can see it is more beneficial to focus on an SEO campaign with high quality keywords than just using PPC. The best strategy would to use a little of both, but still focus more on your SEO. If you are ready to take the plunge and hire an SEO company. Let us know.

When it comes to online marketing there are a lot of ideas of what works and what doesn’t. Some of these strategies do work, others may not. Because search engines keep changing their algorithms some strategies might have once worked, but they don’t work anymore. We have researched and found 5 tried and true strategies to keep in your online marketing portfolio that will give you the most return and won’t become “out of style”.

1. SEO friendly urls. Have all the url’s be search engine friendly. This way it is easier to remember and makes your pages load faster. Here you can even put some of your keywords in your urls.

2. Look at your competitors. Know what your competitors are doing and see what is working and what you can do better. Study your competitors but don’t be a copycat. You want to write articles on your website on hot topics, but make them unique. You don’t just want to copy what others are writing. Take a topic and write about it in your own words. It should be informative and entertaining.

3. Get Backlinks. Backlinks are king. You can post relevant content on blogs and forums with links back to your website. Your content should be linked back to your content or services. Use your link power and link to your home page as well as posts, products or other services that you offer. You can also be a guest blogger on other people’s blog and have them link back to your website.

4. Social Media and Networking. Create a network for your niche. You can do this through blogs, social media groups and online stores. You can share your updates to all your network followers through podcasts, social media avenues, and email marketing. You can also hold giveaways and contests to build your brand. This is a great way to boost your business.

5. Be the Expert. When it comes to your niche write blog posts or social media updates like you are the expert. Focus on your niche and your goals. What do you know and how can you educate those who look up to you. It’s better to have quality posts than quantity posts. Three blogs a week with high quality content is better than having two posts a day with filler content that no one wants to read.

In conclusion, when you follow these five strategies and implement them into your online marketing plan your website will start to rank higher in search engines and in turn your sales or lead conversions will increase. Remember to make your urls friendly, study your competitors for what is working and what isn’t, get links back to your site, create a network using social media, and be the expert for your niche. These five strategies are a must in any online marketing plan.

Taking a quick glance at your SEO status on your website may seem like an overwhelming and daunting task but in reality it isn’t hard at all there are a few points to cover to get the big picture. I want to go over some of those you so you have a good idea of how to get the big picture.

First, you need to start with you need to find your Domain Authority. This is a score that is given to every website based on their SEO, back links, and also age. You want to aim for the highest score possible but it is something that takes time. This score will also give you an idea of what you need to do to improve your site.

Second, determine your site load time. If you site takes a long time to download Google is not going to rank you very high. Speed is important. Your site should load in 1-2 seconds to be considered in the “good” range.

Third, sitemaps. You may not thing that having a sitemap on your website is terribly important, however sitemaps show that you are organized and make things easy to find throughout your site. This is important to Google ranking. If you don’t have a sitemap you can add one quickly and easily but remember you must have one.

Fourth, Look for robots.txt. If you have a site with good SEO you will have a robots.txt file with no major disallows. All this means is that if you don’t have a robots.txt file the “Google spiders” are allowed to crawl every page of your site, some of which may not be important to them causing to lower your Google ranking. Make sure your robots.txt file is intact and disallowing the right pages.

Fifth and final tip, Check for H-tags. H-tags are basically just headers but they are tagged (bolded) in such a way that it makes Google and your audience easy to spot the important content. On a good post, and really throughout your website you should not only have H1 tags (most important) but also include H2, H3, and H4 tags.

Now, don’t expect these little test to answer all your SEO questions but it will however give you an idea of where you stand in the SEO world. This is a quick and easy way to find out how your ranking is coming and what you need to do to improve.