Super Search Engine Marketing

There have been many changes with the Big G and how it shows results so what does it take to get good rankings for your site or page?

Even though there have been significant changes in how google presents search results there really hasn’t been a huge change in what google uses to put you on the top of the results.

Google has certainly moved to favoring local business in it’s search results. This alone has made it easier to get better rankings for sites whose primary purpose is to promote a local business.  This means that if you search for Gourmet Coffee Shops your going to find results that are first local and second ranking well with google.  It appears that the further you are from the location of the business the lower the page is going to rank.  This is not to say that your not going to rank well in other data centers it is just going to be easier to get the local results.

So how do you get ranked well in Google? The basic strategy is still the same.  Google looks at each site as a popularity contest and uses a variety of things to determine how popular your site is compared to others.  One of this is sure volume of backlinks and key words that are linked to your site.  Other factors are the content of your site, quality of the content, the frequency of change in your content.  The more and better content you have on your site the more your going to rank, the more people that visit your site the better your going to rank, the more of googles tools you use the better your going to rank.

One still tried and true method of getting links is pumping out articles to the many article sites that are out there.  This can be time consuming writing and posting articles but the work is worth the effort.  The better your content in your articles the more likely your content will be approved and posted with of course a link or two leading to your site.

Using Social Network sites is a great way to get links.  Setting up a Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and other like accounts and putting up links to your site is another way to not only get links coming in but also a stream of traffic.

So while google has changed many things in how it presents search results, the way to get to the top of those results is still the same.. CONTENT, LINKS, CONTENT, LINKS… master them and you will see your results improve.

Pay Per Show advertising can be effective and is usually much cheaper than Pay Per Click ads.  These are ads that you purchase for a specified period of time on websites.

In order to determine if it is worth your advertising on a site in this manner is a matter of dermining the value. Getting an ad on the local High School Hockey team is great for your local shop or other online business but for another it may not be.  Where ever you place your ads you need to know who is visiting the site and all sites can provide some information on how many unique visitors they have per day, how many repeat visitors and where they usually track in a site.

Everything is logged on the net in some manner or another. Servers track everything from computer address, to a bot scanning your site, what kind of browser, the operating system, time of day, types of files, everything is tracked which leaves a perfect trail that you can use to spread your ad money where it works best.

PPS ads are probably not going to generate lots of traffic to your site and unles you find that there is going to be a value above the number of people who click to your site the better off you are.  There is also an ongoing debate on paying for ads on sites as it may look like your paying to have a link to your site by the SE’s however if they offer up ads from google and the like at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be a big SEO, SEM, or SERP problem.

Sparky

So, you have your website idea, you know what your going to offer, now lets think about how your going to generate revenue from your site.

Hard Goods: Obviously if your selling a product you want someone to make the purchase.  If you have followed along with the various general concepts, website concepts your site is full of CONTENT that makes visitors feel that your offering the best thing since sliced bread.  Selling things will be easy if you get traffic to your site.  Getting Traffic to your site will be discussed in the SEO, SEM, SERP, and General Internet marketing techniques.  But if you have hard goods that your selling on your site, the sales pitch on your site should sell the product.

Soft Goods: If your offering soft goods on your site generating revenue can be done in a couple of different ways and or both ways.  One is to use like I do here and have ads from Google, Yahoo, or other ad service put ads on your site that when people click on it you get a commission on the click.  These are Pay Per Click ads and they will be discussed further here in this section.  Then there is pay per inclusion types of ads these are advertisers that are paying you directly for either links or for graphics with links to their sites.  These are usually more profitable, but both are valuable to generating revenue.  The amount of clicks you get depends again on how many people visit your site.  Another way, that is used less is the pay per view, much like Pay Per View TV people have to subscribe and pay a fee to view the site.  This works if you have the right kind of site, generally an adult site is something people are willing to pay to view.  The more visitors, the more clicks, the more you can charge for direct ads on your site.

Attracting Visitors is the key and that is what this site is really all about.  Getting you set up so that you start to get visitors and customers as quickly as you can.

Sparky.

OK, so you have decided on a “product” your going to offer people.  The next step is market research.  Luckily with the internet and internet based businesses the vast majority of your competition is already on the net.  So search for what your going to offer.

Now there are good ways to get search results and there are bad ways.  In most the search engines if you search for a term without quote marks you get results that are different than those with quote marks.  Suggest you try searching both ways and see what kind of results you get from the various search Engines that are out there.  Your looking for the number of similar businesses or competition to your products.  In the case of my Gourmet Coffee site there are MILLIONS of sites that I am competing against.   1.95 MILLION at last check for the search term Gourmet Coffee.  However my main product line is Flavored Coffee so when a search for that is done it comes up with only Half a Million or 25% of the Gourmet Coffee search.  Thus I have focused my Coffee site to really push the flavored coffees, adding new ones and making sure that part of my site is always updating with new things.

Now that you have an idea of the numbers of competitors you are facing it’s time to look at what they are offering.  Check some of the sites that come up in the results, not just the first one (though for reasons to be discussed later and in other areas look carefully and bookmark the top 5 so you can go back to them later).  You now need to decide is your product going to be able to compete against the competition?  Can you offer a better price?  Can you offer more information? In the case of Blog sites, can you be more entertaining, informative, or a better writer?

DECISION TIME..  Do you go forward? That is a question only you can answer, but you should not be diswaded by the number or quality of the other competitors, mearly have the confidence that you will take some part of the market share that is out there, or create more market share by virtue of your surpassing them in your marketing of your “product”.

Even with Millions of competitors out there, and more growing everyday, doesn’t mean you can not make money off a “product”.  The key to any successful company is how well they are able to market their products vs the competition and the costs of doing business.  Obviously the fewer the number of competitors there are, the better your chances of becoming tops in search results for search terms, but that should not be the only factor going into your decision.

More to come keep watching.

Sparky