SEO vs PPC

March 4th, 2008

intro

In this month's 'good to know', the topic is SEO vs PPC, We'll start by defining these terms, but more importantly, how these marketing strategies can effectively drive traffic to your site.

Last month I presented some “best practices” to use with your email marketing. You can revisit that article and past newsletters here.

As always, you can get the latest info by checking out our website: Pepperstation.com.

Enjoy!

what's new

Spirit 3.4

We introduced something new to our latest version of Spirit nearly every week in February.

• Several performance enhancements implemented.
• Added a “company name” field option to the “Ship-to” area in the customer checkout step.
• MOM exports received a significant performance boost.

Sneak peek - A Reports tab is underway for the Spirit 3.4 administrator. Stay tuned to learn more and shoot us an email if you have a particular report format you would like to see.

newsletter archives

I know how important our newsletters are and the fear everyone has that they may miss an issue (gasp!). So, to keep you covered, we are posting newsletters on our site (ahh the relief!) check out current and past issues at: newsletter.pepperstation.com.

get your own email control panel

FYI, our spiffy new email services (webmail,POP3 etc.) can also include your own email control panel. You can add/edit/remove email accounts, aliases etc. from your control panel.

This is completely free and will let you manage all of your email accounts on your own (no more hassling those PepperStation folks... woot woot).

If you have never tried your webmail, check it out at: webmail.yourdomain.com Its a great way to use your email when your away from your computer.

for the latest news, check out our blog

Visit our blog at blog.pepperstation.com to view service announcements, learn about product updates and get the latest scoop on PepperStation.com.

good to know

In every issue, you'll receive proven ways to make your website, email marketing, and promotion activities more effective. Today, MO writes about the topic of SEO vs PPC...

SEO vs PPC (what the heck is that?!...)

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes “organic” activities which directly affect your web site's content and setup. Search engines do not appreciate all the great images and sharp formatting that makes your site stand out. A search engine only understands the code that makes up your web pages. So, when we talk about website SEO, we are talking about working with the code (html) that makes your website communicate well to the search engines.

Step 1: The first step of an SEO analysis is assessing the following site components: meta tags, key words, page name, site navigation, page titles, page content including image names, URL links, email addresses and so on.

Step 2: The second step in SEO often involves adding content to your site. Search engines love content. By adding new pages, new content, URL links, articles, a blog, additional resources, etc., you are increasing your visibility with search engines.

One item that carries a tremendous amount of weight in how the search engines measure your site's relevance is the number of external sites that contain links to your website. The idea here is the more links to your content that other sites contain, the more relevant the search engine thinks your content is. There are a ways to build more links to your site. The first is to create additional websites that link to your primary site. This is not as difficult as you might imagine. For example, start a blog at blog.yourdomain.com. A blog is a great way to build content and recipical links to your site. Post product or educational videos on YouTube.com and other similar networks. Creating a landing page on MySpace.com is becoming increasingly common practice even for business sites. Participate on relevant blogs and post meaningful content and include a link to your website. Remember when posting on other blogs, it could be considered rude to focus on a sales pitch in your post. Do not include more than one link in your post as the blog may mark it as spam. Finally, locate complimentary sites and work with their webmasters who often exchanges links.

Step 3: The third step is to regularly submit your site's key pages to the major search engines like DMOZ, etc. It can take months before the search engines recognize organic SEO changes so it is important to establish ongoing, monthly SEO activities. As it is all about competition and what the other guy is doing, the sooner you get started, the better.

PPC stands for Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is a traffic generating method where a search engine or directory places your link in their searchable database and charges you a fee every time your URL comes up in a search and someone clicks on it. The amount you pay is determined by bidding on keywords or keyphrases. The two largest PPC search engines are Yahoo and Google AdWords.

You determine the amount of your monthly budget. Rates for a particular term start at pennies per click and depending on competition, can soar. I have seen the PPC rates for local real estate terms like. “tucson real estate” at $8 a click (ouch). What is strikingly different between organic SEO and Pay Per Click is that you can achieve desired ranking results immediately and precisely. PPC has matured a lot over the past few years and they offer very sophisticated tools that give you a great amount of control over how your site's adds will be placed, how they will appear, and budgeting that makes sense for your situation.

Our most successful customers submit their key, highly-optimized site pages monthly (SEO) and have a monthly budget for specific Pay Per Click terms. It is all about keeping one step ahead of the competition and a combined approach is recommended.