For those of you that are totally new to this, if you’re wondering why your site isn’t getting the kind of traffic you expect, or why visitors seem so hard to come by, it could be that your being buried in the search engines. Think about one or two words that describe your product or service, i.e. “golf clubs” or “ipods”. Now plug that into Google and do a search. My search for “ipods” returned 27 million results! Maybe you’re trying to promote something that’s not quite so popular – let’s try “unicycles”. OK, that’s better, only 304,000 results for “unicycles”. Still, unless your site is on the front page of Google (and even there, it probably needs to be in the first 2 or 3 results) nobody will ever see it. So what are you to do? Well if you look at the top of the first page of Google’s search results, you’ll see several listings marked as “Sponsored Links”. Those are people who are bidding to have their URLs show up on the top for that chosen keyword. They’re using a PPC (pay-per-click) service that Google provides, called Adwords. We’ll discuss Adwords in more depth later down the road. But what’s important to understand is that these sponsored Adwords links are costing the advertiser every time someone clicks on it. For highly competitive keywords, those clicks can cost the advertiser $20-30 or more PER CLICK!!! Keep in mind, that’s not per sale, but per click. That’s a lot of money just to get your URL to the top of Google in the hopes that some percentage of people who click on your link will actually purchase your product or service.
So what are you to do if you can’t afford to bankroll that kind of crazy PPC operation? Well fortunately for you, right below those sponsored links are the “unsponsored” links. They’re getting a lot of clicks per day on their links, but they’re not paying anyone for each click. They got to the top of Google by way of what is known as “Organic Search”. At 1Host, we can help you to optimize your pages and work with you to get your site to the top of Google. If you’re interested, you can fill out our SEO quote form here:
The other way to go about it is to simply “do it yourself”. There is a whole science behind the way the search engines work and a whole industry that exists to try and “crack the search engine code”. If you want to try and get your feet wet, I highly recommend you buy and read Aaron Wall’s Seobook. This is really the definitive guide to Search Engine Optimization and Aaron presents it in a way that is easy to digest and understand.
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