ib tutor,tutorial-SEO Vs Paid Search Engine Advertising

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SEO Vs Paid Search Engine Advertising By: Sedemo Williams

Both approaches involve getting traffic from search engines however one important difference is that paid search engine advertising involves you paying money to the search engines and SEO does not. Therefore the search engines will actively encourage you to take part in paid advertising but will do anything they can to discourage you from investing money in SEO.

SEO is used to get sites to rank higher in the natural results, i.e. the free results, sometimes referred to as organic results. It usually takes a long time to rank high within these and once a ranking is achieved you will keep it for a long time. However, while you are waiting to achieve this ranking you will not be getting anything in return.

Paid Advertising is the opposite end of the scale. Results are immediate but much more expensive. You pay every time someone clicks on your advert and therefore visits your site. The amount you pay depends on what your competition are willing to pay. This is indirectly a sort of "pay by results" so it is a lot more effective then the likes of one-of printed advertising where you pay a set price regardless of who reads your advert or how much competition and profit there is around your service or product.

Search Engines have done a lot to discourage people from trying to work their way up the natural rankings and therefore lead people to the alternative which is to hand over money to them.

Miss-Information

The first strategy is to keep it a secret how they rank pages. They are very selective about what information is given out to people. Vague information is given on the authority of any webpage which is updated very infrequently and shown on a logarithmic scale of unknown and possibly inconsistent base. Even accurate information on what people search for and how often is not readily available. Tools used for paid advertising are set up in a way where keywords are grouped together and counted together so that the information is not very useful for SEO purposes. Also very little information is given on long tail / niche terms.

If a site is known to sell links for SEO purposes then search engines may try and give the perception that a link from that site is of no value by setting certain industry tools to show the site as having no authority!

Delayed Results

When work is done to optimise a site and build links to a site there is a deliberate delay between this being noticed by the search engine and the due results being passed on. This is to try and give the impression that these strategies don't work.

Negate The Affects Of Links

Any links known to be paid links will be negated to persuade companies to spend money with the search engines instead of paying other sites for links.

Search Engines have done a very good job of persuading people to pay them as the current landscape is approximately 85%+ of companies' Internet Marketing Budget is spent on paid advertising yet 85%+ of people click on the natural results. The two are completely at odds with each other! The search engines have managed to get such a large percentage of the market to hand over a lot of money to them instead of going down the SEO route. A number of these strategies they claim are to protect the quality of their search engines results however said quality doesn't seem to matter as much when customers are willing to sign up for paid advertising.

Typically SEO will result in a much better return on investment and is the only way to access this 85% of the traffic as opposed to bidding fiercely over the remaining 15%.

However the cost you pay for SEO varies a lot depending on which SEO company you use. Also there will be a cost to any business in having a financial outlay for such a long time without any results until you reach that first page ranking. It is certainly a long term investment.

Search engines will tell you that to rank high you need to write unique content and provide something useful for free and build up a genuine buzz around your business and website.... in the hope that people like this and then link to your website to tell other people about it. This does not work for the majority of commercial organisations. The majority of competitive search terms now show sites that have engaged in SEO. Even sites that appear to be free sources of information have set themselves up in a search engine friendly way and typically engage in something called "pagerank sculpting" to ensure high rankings. You can't compete with these companies by following search engine guidelines and / or spending lots of money on paid advertising.

Creating a big "buzz" about your website and providing free information to get "natural links" is impractical for the majority of small businesses. For example in the UK how many unique versions of "how to chose a dentist" or "top tips to whiter teeth" can be written until all 31,000 registered dentists have one on there site?

Even if a small local company was so good (and lucky) that 100% of their customers happened to be regular internet bloggers and happened to talk about this company online would they also happen to link to the companies website and happened to use accurate keywords that describe your services followed by the geographical location e.g. "Teeth Whitening Dentist Liverpool"... please! With the best will in the world it is impractical if not impossible for a small company with a handful of clients to gain links by waiting round for it to happen this way. That is why search engines tell you to do it this way, so you can give up and resort to handing money over to them.