SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

The majority of web traffic is driven by four major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AskJeeves. Not being found or not being indexed by these search engines puts your business at an incredible disadvantage. People all around the world, 24 hours a day 7 days a week, are searching for information, shopping, and buying. Search is the preferred method of navigating the Internet for many users.

According to an iProspect Study, 35% of search marketers who participate in paid search advertising and outsourced their SEO to an search engine marketing firm recognized higher ROI than from paid search advertising.

Getting to the top of the search engines AND staying there can be quite a challenge and requires real work. There’s no magic pill or program out there that will do it for you overnight.

Sure, there will be some get-rich-quick software that might do it for you but you’ll soon find that it’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Do it right the first time and the rest will be so much easier.

Think of a website as a brick-and-mortar store located on a quiet street. If you don’t market it aggressively, few will get to know your about your site and therefore no one will purchase anything meaning no profits. Like any business, a website requires investment of time, money, and effort to make it work.

The reality is, the hard part is not to get into the top 10 results; it’s to stay there. Competition is fierce at the top for some industries like web hosting, travel and loans.

SEO gives you SEVEN distinct advantages:

1. Lower cost of generating and capturing qualified leads.

These are qualified leads visiting your site because they have consciously searched for information using relevant keywords. This is especially true if they used specific search terms like “buy used chevy truck” instead of “chevy truck”. The first search term is very specific and indicates a ready-to-buy prospect and the latter being more generic and someone who’s likely still shopping around.

2. Cheaper “advertising” cost than traditional mediums as well as Paid Search.

SEO allows you to create a brand very cheaply (in most cases) for a significantly lower investment than traditional advertising like radio, TV, billboards, and yellow pages, ever will. In Doubleclick’s Performics 50 Search Trend Report, average PPC costs have increased 37% from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006.

3. Increases credibility and visibility of your business.

While a large physical presence can be prohibitively expensive and not necessary for a small business, a listing in the top 10 search results increases the perception of credibility to a prospect seeking products and services you provide. It is just like having the biggest ads in the yellow pages helps you get more business as opposed to small line listings.
Online, you can be as small as a one-person business running everything from home doing business with a large fortune 100 corporation. Offline, having a professional office or large office with many employees may increase your credibility and ability to close a sale with a big client.
Anyone can throw up a website in a few hours and pay for clicks. Organic search results tend to be more credible and have higher click through rates than their pay-per-click counterparts.

4. No danger of pay-per-click fraud.

Because you aren’t paying for clicks to visit your site, there’ll never be any issues with an ad publisher using Adsense or something similar, artificially clicking to increase ad profits.
Unscrupulous competitors will also not be able to artificially inflate your advertising cost by clicking on your site to run up your ad budget.

5. Incredible rate of return for initial optimization work, especially in niche markets.

For niche markets, you’ll only have to do the work once and your site will stay in the top results for a very long time. And as the site ages, the value of that site increases and solidifies your value to visitors.
Even in competitive markets, a listing in the top 3 pages of SERPs garners more than 90% of the search traffic, revenue, and profits. If you are in competitive markets, larger companies will likely win the PPC listing wars. The top PPC advertising companies include eBay, NextTag, Orbitz, Target, and Yahoo. With their financial might, they would use PPC as an branding medium in addition to generating sales leaving smaller advertisers in the dust. In time, PPC bid prices will significantly increase as the pattern in Fact #2 indicates.

6. Consider the eyetracking research done by MarketingSherpa, where

people’s eyes are skimming results so quickly that if they don’t see your one listing, you won’t get a second chance. Plus, not everyone reads and clicks on search results in the same way.

People skim the page using one of 5 ways depending on their education or where they are in the sales cycle: Quick Click, Linear Scan, Golden Triangle Scan, Deliberate Scan, or Pickup Search. Having multiple listings (paid and organic search listings) or main page organic search listing + indented organic search listing adds to your ability to achieve a higher clickthrough rate (CTR).

7. In the other aspect of MarketingSherpa’s eyetracking research, they found searchers less likely to look at right column results compared to the left column. Their study indicates that up to 85% of searchers “tend to ignore the paid listings”. This finding is backed up by JupiterResearch’s 2005 Study which revealed that 87% of commercial clicks occur “on the natural (not sponsored) search results.” Not surprising, considering 66% of consumers “distrust” paid search ads (JupiterResearch 2003 Study).

The revealing study showed up in the eyetracking heatmap from a Google search.

The brightest areas were the hottest parts of page looked at. This weighs heavily in favor of achieving maximum visibility for your most important key phrases.

This research translated to what percentage of searchers looked at results in the top ten search engine results pages (SERPs).

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

According to the E-consultancy Search Marketing Buyer’s Guide for 2006, the U.K. market for search engine marketing will be worth an estimated £1.41 billion ($2.6 billion) by the end of 2006 with paid search amounting to more than 90% of the total (US$2.4 billion). SEO will be worth US$276 million by the end of 2006.

Jagger is the name of the latest major Google Algorithm update. This update was done in three phases: Jagger 1, 2, and 3. These major updates are referred to as the ‘Google Dance’ and used to be done on a monthly basis before they switched to a continual update of the SERPs with major updates every three months.

Since this latest Google update, it has caused many sites to drop in rankings or disappear completely from the SERPs. Many of these sites disappearing used linking strategies like link exchanges.

Reciprocal linking appears to be on the decline as a linking strategy and effective link building has to come from a variety of links built using three-way linking, article submissions, press releases, and purchasing quality one-way links. This truly is the better way to maintain high rankings long-term. While reciprocal linking strategies work for Yahoo and MSN at the moment, it’s likely that time will change this as well.

This goes for link networks like Powerlinks as well. Link networks where you can join a program and immediately gain hundreds or thousands of link partners automatically are very easily detected by the search engines. If you’re relying on these for your rankings, be ready for the drop in rankings if you have not been dealt a blow yet. That time will come sooner than you think.

Directory submissions are still a part of any Search Engine Optimization campaign (albeit a small part). Good link building involves being able to get good links that will count, especially in directory submissions which many SEOs do as part of an overall Search Engine Marketing arsenal. In the case of directory submissions, you’ll want to vary the link text and surrounding text every couple of links to ensure that you get credit for those links. If all one-way links pointing to you contain the same link text and description, you could be setting yourself up for duplicate content filtering, rendering those links useless in Google. One of the ways that can be accomplished is through not just varying of your link text, but also varying of your surrounding text in a link. While difficult to implement on Google’s end, it’s very possible that the way they can detect artificial linking is through analysis of the surrounding text of a link. Clearly, if the link text is all the same and the description is as well, it signals to Google that this is an artificial link strategy and can lead them to discount the link value. One-way links and three-way links are preferred over reciprocal links because they appear more natural.

Chasing the latest search engine algorithms is a rather futile effort. Rather than tricking the search engines or reverse engineering the algorithms to find its weaknesses, develop a site worthy of being ranked through great content that’s unique and well-optimized. Getting ranked on Google gets increasingly difficult with each passing day. The other search engines are also following suit by getting better at filtering spammy results. If you still want to manipulate rankings, use advanced linking strategies like randomizing text in articles and inbound links that won’t alert the search engines to your activities.

As a SEO, I would never optimize any site if it did not already contain a lot of useful content for visitors. Focusing on building a quality site with lots of relevant non-duplicated content (available on-site and off-site), gives you a big boost in rankings. You really can’t go wrong with content because if you provide excellent value to your visitors and actively promote it, there’s no reason why your site should not be easily found in the SERPs.