Search Engine Optimisation & Pay-Per-Click Advertising

This post deviates a little from what this blog has been devoted to for the last 8 posts. This entry will give you a basic explanation of the digital marketing techniques, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC.)

So what is SEO? SEO is a process by which companies get their website to the top of page 1 on search engines in the natural results. Natural results are the main results that AREN'T paid for; Google separates them clearly whereas other search engines do not. So take Google for example; you see the list with the top link e.g. you searched "Apple" and behold, the homepage of Apple Inc. appears with a few more links below e.g. the wiki page on the fruit etc. Search engines like Google do this in a number of ways.
   Firstly 'spiders', also known as bots, 'crawl' through the millions of results that are probably relevant to what you searched for. From here, they are indexed according to certain key factors such as the meta-tag i.e. that green address below the hyperlink, providing information on the type of document such as HTTP or HTML. On-page ranking i.e. number of relevant words on a page and 'building links'. Building links is the process of linking to external sites and having as many sites as possibly linking back to your own, since it can obviously increase the flow of traffic to the main site and affiliates. It is for this reason that back in the early days of SEO, companies would link to sites such as the US Library of Congress, since it was the largest in the world in terms of links. This kind of manoeuvre would propel companies to the top of page one very quickly. The latest Penguin updates from Google however, would ensure that you will be penalised, so don't complain to me when you lose out because you thought you'd try and cheat the system.
   Whilst on the subject of inadvisable tactics, keyword 'stuffing' will also be penalised. The meta-tags mentioned previously can match up with the keyword searched for and thus take the page higher up in the results for that specific keyword/phrase. However, when you literally stuff your site's page with repeated metadata, it renders your text clunky and it will become a burden to read. You may have noticed that text found on the Internet can sometimes be arduous to read or that there isn't something quite right with it. Much text on the Internet is optimised for search engines, but simply placing text like the following example will most likely result in you getting shot down by Penguin:

"Welcome to Awesome Cycling Inc. At Awesome Cycling we care about the cycling needs of our awesome customers, so much in fact that we have created a whole awesome bunch of awesome deals to meet your awesome cycling needs. At Awesome Cycling we care deeply since you are all so awesome and love cycling so much. Why would be here at Awesome Cycling .com if you weren't interested in cycling in the slightest..."

Okay, so I may have overdone it at the end, but you get the point. Now let's move on.
   After the slight digression, we now move on to Google returning the results to you. Google, upon receiving your keyword and assorting data, will then feed back to the closest server to your IP Address and from here, the search page, optimised by the aforementioned criteria is returned to your computer and Internet browser. From here, you may select the most relevant link or adjust search terms to possibly yield more favourable results.

That is basically all SEO is pretty much, a method of increasing page prominence via, keyword relevance, link-building and metadata relevance. However, where to paid-for results come from? Let's find out!
 
Paid results are those 'sponsored links' that appear on Google. These are paid for usually by the thousands and will result in pay-per-click advertising (PPC.) PPC will be an added cost to a business the second someone clicks on that advert Google placed on the side of the page, whether they buy something once there or not. Potentially, a company could buy out the clicks of competitors e.g. Pepsi buying clicks for 'Coca-Cola' to aid competition in the paid results section. Google do this via a tool called AdWords which can be used to deduce the price of a hyperlink placement. This is done through the number of daily, monthly etc. searches of that keyword and geographics i.e. where those searches come from in the world and how many in relation to your location i.e. nationally. This helps to determine the cost per click.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and (hopefully) found it interesting at the very least. I will be posting again sometime soon and may update certain pages outside of here for example the Pinterest page. I have also decided to continue work on 'Myths to Believe In' and have pretty much compiled a list of poems to place within it. I will write again soon so in the mean time, stay tuned.

Regards, Jake