LEFT OR RIGHT - WHICH IS BEST? (Pt1)

Christine Stander

In the ever popular industry of search engine marketing, not only are website owners bombarded with a multitude of different options ranging from search engine optimization and pay per click all the way to viral and affiliate marketing.
The need to choose the best option in an evolving competitive environment has become ever increasingly important.

This first part of a two part article will discover the differences in results displayed on the search engine results pages and which is the most effective method to target, including the difference between natural search and pay-per-click listings, the search engines that display them, how they rank them and which strategy you should implement for your website to obtain the best results.

The second part will cover external marketing methods including viral and affiliate marketing.

Knowing your left from right

The results displayed on the left hand side of the search results page are commonly referred to as natural listings. Google, MSN and Yahoo! spider the web and automatically determine the rank given to each website by various predetermined factors and relevancy triggers. The order of results *are generally displayed from the most relevant sites being on the first page and then decreasing in relevance as the pages progress.

The results displayed on the right hand side of the search results page are commonly referred to as sponsored listings (Pay-Per-Click). These are paid for listings where account holders bid on various keywords for their desired placement. The order of results is not necessarily by the most relevant website, but rather the highest bid for that particular keyword.

(*The results “should be” displayed from the most relevant, however by introducing various search engine optimisation techniques, websites are able to appear in top positions yet may not always be the most relevant website for that particular keyword.)

Natural Listings

With natural listings website rankings fluctuate as new sites and or pages are added to the index. Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) all around the world watch this process with keen interest as they continually re-optimize their websites to remain at their sought after positions in the index.

Optimizing websites for good rankings are relatively easy to achieve. You do not necessarily have to contract the services of a professional. Generally if you build a good content relevant site on a solid platform, make use of a good internal, inbound and outbound linking structure your site should fall within an acceptable ranking on the result page listings.

Should your website lie within a very competitive area of the market, you may find that contracting a professional SEO who will attend to your site requirements full time, would be a wise decision.
Sponsored Listings

With sponsored listings, Google makes use of its own Pay-For-Performance program called Adwords. MSN and Yahoo! both make use of Overture (which is owned by Yahoo!) for their Paid listings. In both programs you only pay when people click on your ad, which makes this type of advertising extremely cost effective.

Account holders are not able to optimize their adverts such as SEOs would optimize their websites to achieve higher ranking. The order of results is displayed according to the highest bid for that particular keyword.

According to a few users views on the two different experiences, with Yahoo! advertisers often pay less per click than with Google. However Google delivers more traffic and often times converts better than Yahoo!’s delivered clicks.

Natural or Paid Search – which is right for your website

There is no wrong or right way to market your website. As was once said “Any publicity is good publicity.” And it remains to ring true in the land of search marketing where it is “be seen or face the chance of disappearing below your competitors”.

Each website’s marketing strategy is unique. It all depends on what your desired results and expected deliverable time frames are at the end of the day.

Results achieved from optimising your website for natural listings take longer to come into effect, but deliver a long term solution to your traffic.

Results achieved for sponsored listings are of immediate effect; however deliver a short term solution to your traffic and could be rather costly depending on the competitiveness of your market.

"PPC is one of the fastest ways to drive large, predictable amounts of extremely targeted visitors to your Web site," says Jean Lam in WebProNews. "There is a huge difference between getting normal top five rankings in the major search engines and getting a top five ranking in the pay-per-click listings."

A combination of the two strategies is recommended to achieve optimum results. Build a good content relevant site, ie optimized for both search engines and visitors, and launch a PPC campaign alongside. In this way while the search engines juggle the relevance in their indices the PPC campaign will deliver traffic to your site fast and get your brand noticed.

Brand awareness sparks interest which sparks traffic which leads to conversions and ultimately ROI.

About the Author

Christine Stander is a professional search engine optimisation and online marketing strategist with experience in many facets of search marketing, user behaviour analysis and brand management. For more information on services offered, kindly refer to: http://www.incubeta.com

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