Archive: January, 2009

Pay Per Click is a big hairy beast in the Search Engine Optimization business. It’s known by other
names – Pay Per Placement, Pay Per Ranking, Pay Per Position, or Cost Per Click – but a rose is
rose by any other name. Because there are big dollars at stake in Internet Marketing, the space or
geography around or associated with keyword search results is a highly valued commodity – the
very real estate that holds your search results has value and can be purchased because the seeker
has already played their hand – based on their search request, you know what he or she is looking
for, and if it’s a match with what you’re selling, then it’s a match made for commerce.
Simply put, Pay Per Click is an Internet advertising model that associates your site with the top
search engine results generated from keywords that match the phraseological units encompassing
your product or service. And let’s not pull any punches here – the highest bidder for a popular
keyword will find their ad positioned higher in the search results, thereby increasing the chances
of a like-minded click to your site.
So who’s paying who? There are no fees to list your advertisement. But as the name implies, the
retailer pays their PPC provider every time a searcher clicks the ad that connects to your site. At its
core, Pay Per Click is a proven method to drive targeted traffic to your site. The Pay Per Click
advertising model has grown from its infancy into a multi-billion dollar industry with Pay Per
Click providers growing more feature-rich offerings such as the ability to select the preferred
country and language for your advertisement, and for those who have bitten off more than they
can chew, there has been a predominant growth in bid management services to help manage your
Pay Per Click campaigns across multiple engines.
In fact, Pay Per Click is such a cornerstone of Internet Marketing, that content publishers have
also entered the game by adding products like Google’s PPC Adsense, Yahoo! Search Marketing,
and Microsoft adCenter to their sites. It is now standard fair that Pay Per Click initiatives fall into
one of two camps: sponsored match campaigns and content match campaigns. Sponsored match
campaigns promote advertisements on search engine results pages, while on the other hand,
content match campaigns promote advertisements on publisher websites, newsletters, and emails.
Although search engines have gone to great lengths to guard against disreputable practices in the
world of Pay Per Click – like implementing automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by
competitors or corrupt webmasters – the PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click
fraud.

So you’ve grabbed a pencil and dashed down all the keywords that you associate with your business. You’ve been frugal in your choices though – words like invigorating are probably more associated with how your business makes you feel so they don’t make the list. You keep the list simple by keeping the list general. Take as an example the sporting goods store – the first item on the list should be…sporting goods. Once you have your list of key words you might expect to be buying the Dallas Mavericks at any time, but there is another job to be done before we can go any further. You need to see if your lists of keywords match the phrases the seekers are typing into the search bar. This is where phraseology comes into play.

If we place the term targeted marketing under a microscope to get a snapshot of its DNA, we’ll likely find a string of keywords linked together in a cohesive chain. Increasing the magnification a few degrees further, we see that the real building blocks of SEO are words that are key designators. To help explain this, you need only to look at a book on your desk. If you have a book of non-fiction handy, flip to the back. Chances are, the book you’re holding has an index at the rear of the text. What you see before you is a list of keywords, that is to say, words that are essential for the definition of the material in the book. If you think of a book as a living thing, the key words are the DNA used to build the book.

Let’s assume we’ve all made it into 2009 in one form or another, some of us maybe showing the scars of recent beatings on the stock market, some of us frantically searching for a flashlight in the face of dark uncertainty on the road ahead. There’s no need to crawl away into the woods, though. We know some things to be true in the coming days – Obama will be marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, auto workers will be down to their last fingernail, bailouts will try to white wash Wall Street, and people, otherwise known as customers, will still be searching for what they require. Yes it’s true, no matter what the brand of uncertainty is on the street, business will still go on – but here’s the catch – in the year ahead, all of us will have to be better at what we do to make the same buck we made two years ago. And that’s why we need to re-engage with the basics of Search Engine Optimization, to make sure we are standing on firm foundations before we reach.