Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Companys Web Site [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Organic Search

Organic search refers to the way search engines find the most relevant match to a searcher's query. Organic search results are driven purely by the relevance of the matches to the query words that the searcher entered, and are not influenced by any payments made to the search engine by search marketers. Google and Yahoo! provide organic search results, but so do many other search engines that you might not think of, including shopping search engines (such as Shopping.com) and specialty engines (such as Orbitz, the travel site, at search engine optimization (SEO). For some organizations, organic search is by far the least expensive of all search marketing techniques, but for others it can be frightfully expensive, demanding costly technology or content changes. Let's look at the basic steps for organic search:

Sometimes these steps can be simple, but often there are so many approaches to improve organic search that decision-making can be difficult. Later in this book, we explore these approaches in depth so you can decide which ones are right for you. For now, let's just look at how different options have different price tags.

What It Costs

Organic search is an interesting search marketing technique, because utilizing the technique can cost nothing, or it can be expensive, depending on the situation you are in and what you decide to do about it.

It is possible that your site might already be well represented in search indexes and might already rank well in organic search for many queries. If so, it might be inexpensive to improve your results even more, by choosing more keywords to sprinkle into your content, for example. If your site has few pages indexed and is missing in action in the search results, however, optimizing your content for organic search can be a daunting prospectit can be complicated and expensive to make the changes required.

With organic search, you do not need to optimize every page on your site (although that is great to do)you need only optimize the pages that you want returned for the keywords you are targeting. One reason you might shy away from optimizing every page is that it can be expensive to do. Figure 3-1 shows you the range of prices you should expect to pay to optimize your pages.

The biggest costs for organic search come from hiring search marketing consultants, changing the content and technology of your site, and paying for inclusion of your pages in the search index.

Search Marketing Consultants

If you need expert advice on choosing keywords, optimizing your content, or getting your pages indexed, it does not come cheap. If you want to start small, you might find some search marketing firms that will help you optimize a few pages for important keywords for between $5,000 and $20,000. Conversely, if you need a consultant to thoroughly address problems in a large site, expect to pay hundreds of thousands per year.Chapter 8, "Define Your Search Marketing Strategy," walks you through the process.

Content and Technology Changes

What you spend for your organization's own resources to make content and technology changes to your site is usually your largest expense for organic search marketing. Part 3 of this book is devoted to diagnosing search problems and helping you correct them.Chapter 9, "Sell Your Search Marketing Proposal," tackles how you convince the Web team to take that on. After you are successful, and the Web team makes search-related changes every day, you still will not know how much it costs, but at least it will be happening.

Organic search success usually requires fine-tuning to allow spiders to crawl your pages and to ensure your pages are found by the right search queries. If your site has a small number o116 pages, updating the content is not pricey. If you have a huge dynamically generated site, however, it can be expensive to fix the technology so that spiders can see those dynamic pages. In addition to changes required by spiders, shopping search engines (and some others) depend on your data being sent to them, which forces you to write or buy a program that does that. On top of that, you always need to update your content to provide proper keyword prominence and density to get high rankings. All these content and technology changes cost money.Chapter 10, "Get Your Site Indexed," we work through the most common site design problems and the technology changes required to correct them. Usually, they require some kind of technology change, for example:

We must change the commerce URLs so that they do not have so many dynamic parameters.

We have to update the content management system so that writers can modify the titles and descriptions for every page.

We have to modify the metadata template for al122 pages so that we do not block the spider from crawling each page.

We need to change the menus in the left navigation bar so that they do not require JavaScript.

We must remove session identifiers from the URLs.

Don't worry if you don't understand the list. That's the point, actually. Every item in that list is something that your technology folks might need to do to fix your site so that spiders can crawl your pages. (And we cover many more, too.)

It is possible that your site suffers from few or even none of these technology problems. If so, organic search optimization will likely be inexpensive. If your site suffers from some of these problems, however, it can be expensive to get them fixed. Technology projects can be costly, hard to manage, and slow to complete. It is not unheard of for a large company to spend millions of dollars over several years to eradicate all of these organic search problems.

Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion is the one organic search technique where you pay search engines. In contrast with paid placement, where you bid on keywords to be listed in the paid results, paid inclusion gets your pages into the index to be shown in the organic results. With paid inclusion, you pay a fee to the search engine for each page that you want included in its search index.trusted feed. We cover paid inclusion in detail in Chapter 10. For now, just realize that you might need to pay for inclusion to improve your organic search results.

The Benefits and Challenges

Despite the wide disparity in what an organic search marketing effort can cost, no search marketer can skip organic search. Organic search is critical to any search marketing program, even if you also use other search marketing techniques. But organic search offers a unique set of benefits and challenges.

Highly Qualified Visitors Will Come to Your Site

Organic searchers who click your pages are highly qualified visitors to your site. They are much more likely to make a purchase than some other kinds of visitors you receive.Chapter 4, "How Searchers Work," many searchers focus on organic results to the exclusion of the paid listings on the page. Your site must appear in organic results to attract those searchers. But this benefit of appearing in the organic results leads to a challenge, because it is not easy to get your page ranked #1 in organic results.

With paid placement, for example, anyone with a big enough budget can buy the #1 paid result, and they will get visitors to click through to their site. Organic search, in contrast, can require a lot of effort in modifying content and technology on your site, and no one can guarantee when (or if) it will pay off in higher-qualified visitors. That's the basic organic search challenge.

You Can Do It on a Budget

Although scary problems exist that can make organic search a challenge for some Web sites, there are ways to succeed at organic search inexpensively. Your site probably has many pages in the search index already, and you can tune the content for these pages to rank higher and draw more traffic.Chapter 7, "Measure Your Search Marketing Success," shows you how to assess the situation in which you find yourself.

What You Do Works Across Search Engines

Unlike paid placement, where an ad listed with Yahoo! does not appear in Google, most organic search techniques work across all search engines. Whatever you do to allow Google's spider to crawl your site will probably also help the Ask Jeeves spider. Similarly, improving your keyword prominence and density helps your pages rank higher in all search engines. Just by its nature, organic search tends to require the same techniques for all search engines.

Beyond this natural tendency, currently only four organic search technologies are used by the major worldwide search engines, as shown in Table 3-1. That is a big change from a few years ago, when there were a dozen technologies around. With a dozen technologies, it was rarely worth pursuing any organic search technique that worked for only one technology. Now, with only four technologies in the game, it can be worthwhile to do things that affect only one technology, because numerous search engines use each technology. One example is paid inclusiononly Yahoo! offers it, but it affects all of the search engines syndicating the Yahoo! organic search technology, so it makes sense to consider.

How to Get Started

Organic search is probably the easiest search marketing technique to get started with, because you are already started. It is highly likely that spiders already crawl your site, placing your pages in their indexes. If you search for your company's name, your home page might already be shown high in the list.

So what does it really mean to get started with organic search? It goes back to the basic steps laid out earlier:

Organic search is critical to any search marketing plan. Because it requires a great deal of expertise to succeed, most of the rest of this book shows you how. However, there are also other techniques for you to learn, starting with directory listings.