Module I: Introduction to Organic Search Marketing
1. How Search Engines Work
A search engine is basically a massive database. Search engines deploy programs called “spiders” that “crawl” the internet, categorizing pages and using an algorithm to assign a value to them.
VOCABULARY: Search Engine Spider - A computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Spiders are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages for use in the search engine that deployed them.
VOCABULARY: Crawling – When a spider “crawls,” it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.
VOCABULARY: Indexing – The collection, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. The purpose of storing an index is to optimize speed and performance in finding relevant documents for a search query.
Search engines have four distinct functions – Crawling the internet, indexing the pages and building a database, calculating the relevancy of indexed pages and ultimately, serving relevant results to users’ search queries.
As a spider crawls a page, it identifies all of the hyperlinks and eventually follows them. Now on a new page, the spider repeats the process, following all of the newly identified links. In this manner, spiders can reach the billions of individual web pages on the internet.
Spiders store key elements from crawled pages in a database. This process is called indexing.
The search engine uses the data the collected from the spider to serve results deemed relevant to the searcher’s query and ranks them in order of perceived value.
Each search engine has various ways of measuring a website’s relevance to a search query. Google, for example, utilizes an algorithm called “Page Rank,” that categorizes and assigns a weighted value to websites. If you’re brave, read the original journal on the subject, written by Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html).
Search engine developers take great measures to keep their ranking algorithms secret. They don’t want webmasters taking advantage of their systems and flooding their search engine with spam and garbage. They want their search engine to provide the most relevant results as possible. Methods that trick search engines into categorizing a non-relevant site as relevant are consider “black hat.”
VOCABULARY: Black Hat – Any technique, such as repeating unrelated phrases, that attempt to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine.
VOCABULARY: White Hat – Techniques designed to improve a website’s relevancy that fall within the guidelines set forth by a search engine’s guidelines to ethical practices.
Black hat techniques are frowned upon and usually can lead to a website’s permanent removal from the search engine’s results altogether.
Employing “white hat” techniques, also known as “organic search” techniques, are methods employed that are fully supported and recommended by the search engines.
Search engine developers from all three major search engines (Yahoo, Bing and Google) have all released basic guidelines to follow if you want to see your website rank higher in the SERPs.
- In the body of the text, DO include words that users may search for to find information. These words are called keywords.
VOCABULARY: Keyword – A term used to retrieve documents in an information system such as a catalog or a search engine. Keywords “captures the essence” of a topic of a document. Think of them as descriptions of the page, or the theme of the website. These are very important to determine BEFORE optimizing your site. There is an effective tool that can help you research this element that we can discuss in a later chapter. [Keyword Spy].
- DO make sure that every page on your website has another page (internal or external?) linking to it.
- DO have a clear website hierarchy and clean website structure. (easy-to-navigate menus)
- DO create a highly informative website, with pages that read clearly. Make sure your audience can understand your message of value.
- DO include keyword rich title and meta-description elements. The search engines may not index the meta tags anymore, but how else would the spiders know what your site was about? They use the description data.
- DO NOT put keywords in images. Search engine spiders have a hard time indexing non-text components of a website. The ALT tab is the spider’s way of reading your images.
- DO NOT include more than 100 links on a particular page. This will appear spammy and messy to the search engine spiders. They will also think you are selling links which is a good way to get your site thrown into oblivion, never to be found again.
- DO NOT try to trick the crawlers by overloading the metadata with the same keywords. This will have the spiders reporting your site as spam quicker than anything.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand at this point. These are only a few of the steps you’ll need to take to gain higher search rankings and we’re going to delve deeper into each concept later on in the course.
2. What is Organic Search Marketing?
There are two forms of marketing on the internet – organic and paid placement. That’s it. If you pay for your website to appear on a website in any shape or form, it is NOT organic search marketing. It’s paid placement. Why? You PAID someone to PLACE your website on theirs. If you trade links with another webmaster, you are still engaging in a PAID PLACEMENT transaction. The currency is real estate on your website.
VOCABULARY: Real Estate – Empty space on a website. All of the appropriate space should be used on a website.
VOCABULARY: Organic Search Marketing – The process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
VOCABULARY: Paid Placement Marketing - An Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay or trade for placement on another website. “Pay Per Click,” is the most popular form of paid placement marketing.
It’s essential for you to understand the difference between organic search marketing and paid placement marketing.
Remember, if you are paying to have your site listed anywhere, then you are engaging in paid placement.
Organic search and paid placement have a synergistic, almost symbiotic relationship. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and most other search engines earn the bulk of their revenue not from their search engine developments, but by selling pay per click advertisements.
VOCABULARY: Pay Per Click (PPC) – An Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.
To justify the cost of PPC, a search engine’s organic searches must be as accurate and informative as possible to keep people returning to the search engine as their source of information. Then, the search engine companies can tell potential advertisers that their search engine receives [x] amount of visitors each day, and their ad will be potentially seen by them.
Search engine companies spend a tremendous amount of money to ensure that their search engine provides the quickest, most relevant results. With companies like Google, who has long dominated the organic search market with a 65% search market share, and processing over 1 billion searches a day, other search engines must offer some sort of incentive to break into the market. Bing for example, billing itself as a “decision engine,” once offered cash back on select products purchased through specialized partner links on search pages. For example, if a user searches for “mp3 player” on Bing, they would receive the standard search listings alongside “cash back” links that will forward the user to a partner’s website. If the user ultimately purchases the mp3 player from the partner site, they’ll receive a cash back rebate on the purchase.
Ultimately, the goal is to drive more traffic to the search engine and as a result, sell more paid placement ads.
3. Benefits of Organic Search Marketing vs. Paid Placement
Organic search marketing is an attractive marketing strategy for many forms of online businesses – especially niche websites. Niche webmasters can solely rely on organic search marketing, benefiting from the strategy in several vital ways.
Perception of Authority
Studies have shown that natural, organic listings on a search engine are perceived as an authority compared to paid advertisements. People are more likely to trust information from websites they find through organic listings than websites that paid to be listed at #1.
In April 2006, a study conducted by iProspect and Jupiter Research discovered that 62% of search engine users click results within the first page of the SERPs. 90% click within the first three pages.
In August 2006, AOL’s search query logs were leaked and analyzed by independent researchers (http://www.webuildpages.com/jim/click-rate-for-top-10-search-results/). Their study concluded that the first 10 results in the SERPS received roughly 89% of all click-through traffic.
This implies that web searchers are relying on the search engine to point them in the right direction. After all, that’s the purpose of a search engine – to provide answers to questions.
High ROI – Cost Efficiency
Organic search marketing is considered “free.” The only costs for you are man-hours as opposed to paid placement, which is generally a volatile market.
Depending on your market, paid placement campaigns can be cost restrictive. In New York, lawyers bidding on workers’ compensation keywords can expect to pay up to $145 per click! Unless you’re working with a massive budget, your marketing campaigns won’t last long.
Organic search marketing is also significantly cheaper than traditional advertising models such as television, print, and direct mail.
Longevity
Once a website is indexed by a search engine, it generally stays indexed on it unless the webmaster breaks one of the rules. Essentially, an indexed page is a free, permanent advertisement for your website.
Qualification of Leads
The searcher that clicks on the top organic 5-10 entries in Search Engine Results Pages – or SERP, are farther along in the buying cycle, and are generally conducting research to justify their purchase and also from whom they shall make their purchase. Without a doubt, these are the leads you want. These people are going to buy from someone, but not someone on page 2, or perhaps even number two. Top placement gets clicked on almost every single search.
VOCABULARY: SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) – The listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.
With a high placement in organic search results, you can capture a great deal of the compulsive internet purchasers, but you can also capture ‘researching searchers’ and convert them into sales. Consumers can be compelled to buy from you once they get to your site if your site has the right calls to action, and the compelled users to buy.
4. Why Optimize for Search Marketing
A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project concluded that 90% of male internet users, and 91% of female internet users commonly refer to search engines for answers. In 2009, over 259.6 million people used the internet on a regular basis.
This trend has grown exponentially over the past five years and will continue to do so. The online marketplace can be fierce, but by the end of this course, you will have the tools and knowledge to tame it. Ultimately, the internet has radically changed the way we do business and it does not seem to show any sign of slowing any time soon.
What a local business might have been able to advertise to a finite number of potential customers in his confined geographical area now has the ability to be advertised AND SOLD globally. If what you’re selling is knowledge or a commodity that can only be derived from you, then your possibilities are endless in terms of potential customers.
Online Business Exceeds Growth Potential Over Any Other Medium Of Sales!!!!