~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Frederick B.
I have to confess that I am a pay per search addict and that goto.com
is my drug (do not forward this message to them please) with others
like search cactus, findwhat etc... Why? Because my senior management
put such a pressure on me to get up and running in the search engine
in no time, I could not wait for my home page (the only static page of
my site... Sigh!) to be referenced by the pure engines. I have a list
of 400 keywords running in goto.com and I do not think I could have
achieved a great placement like this on AV or Google through a normal
spiel! Well... This is my point of view, do you think I have a sound
strategy... or not????
Best regards,
Frederick
~~~Jill's Response~~~
As many of you know, we've never really endorsed the use of pay per
click engines such as GoTo (see Issue 034). (Not to mention that GoTo just raised their rates to be out of the reach of many small
businesses.) However, I *can* see the value in bidding for keyphrases
as a way of snatching some quick traffic, while you're waiting for the
major search engines to get around to spidering your site.
It will usually take many months to correctly optimize a site, submit
it, get listed, see results, build traffic, and make sales. During
this waiting period, it might be worthwhile to pay for clicks that can
lead to some immediate results. I've heard differing tales on whether
or not the traffic from these deals is worth the return on investment,
but it shouldn't hurt to test it for a few months. After all, *some*
traffic is probably better than *no* traffic. At least you'll be
getting the word out about your site.
Does this mean you should ONLY use pay per click engines, or that you
should simply forget about optimizing your site to rank high in the
spidering search engines? Heck no! I'm certain that the traffic you
can realize from the major search engines and directories will be much
more qualified than the traffic you may receive from pay per click
listings. I'm also fairly certain that less and less people will be
clicking on these "sponsored links" once they are aware that they're
simply glorified advertisements.
As we've discussed many times before, if your site is written to sell,
and it is also getting high rankings for specific, relevant
keyphrases, your Internet business has the potential to soar! We've
seen dramatic results to many a business' bottom line once a good
search engine optimization kicks in. I am convinced that nearly any
site can benefit from an optimization, and would never recommend a pay
per click campaign without an optimization to go with it. (See last
week's new article, "Search Engine Optimization and the Bottom Line,") for more information
on this. It's important to note that SEO will never be a quick fix.
However, the best things in life are usually worth waiting for!
Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question
was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about
that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting
questions, so ask away!
