Search Engine Optimisation refers to improving the placement of your website in the organic search results of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing for selected keywords or phrases related to your business.

Before you can understand exactly what SEO is, you need a background understanding of how the search engines work and how they determine the rank of websites in their search results. You also need to understand the difference between organic search engine results and paid search engine results.

Each search engine uses a different set of criteria to determine exactly what sites are “most relevant” for each search term — these are known as the search engine ranking algorithms. The algorithms take many factors into account and in Google’s case there are over 200 different factors that are used to determine a site’s ranking. These algorithms are changed and updated constantly, so a large part of Search Engine Optimisation is keeping up to date with the important factors in the search engine ranking algorithms.

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO involves making onsite changes to your website and completing offsite tasks to increase its search engine friendliness. The more the search engines “like” your website the more likely they are to rank it highly in the search results. The search engines try to determine and return the websites that will be most relevant and useful for each search completed. The more useful the results, the more people will use the search engine and the more revenue the search engine will make.

Onsite SEO
Onsite Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) incorporates any changes made specifically to the website’s content or code. There are hundreds of known aspects of both website coding and content that are believed to increase a website’s attractiveness to the search engines. These can include things such as:

Website layout and structure
Proper use of HTML tags
Inclusion of keywords in prominent positions and content
And many, many more
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO entails building your website’s prominence on the wider web. The search engines not only look at your website’s code and content to determine how it will rank in the search results but also how it appears in the broader online community.

A large part of Search Engine Optimisation involves increasing your website’s endorsements or recommendations by building inbound links from other websites to yours. Each inbound link that comes from another website to yours can be seen as a recommendation that your website is a valuable source of information and hence should be displayed more highly in the search results.

Generating inbound links to your website can be a difficult task and often happens naturally over time — however the process can often be expedited using various techniques such as:

Make sure your website is listed in relevant, trustworthy online directories
Creating valuable, interesting content that other websites will want to link to
Being an active online community member on forums, blogs and online discussions
Creating an active social media campaign and generating interest via social interaction
And many, many more
Successful SEO for your website
A successful SEO campaign has to incorporate many different things, including in-depth keyword research to determine the keywords most relevant for your business; a balance of onsite and offsite SEO; a balance of user friendliness versus search engine friendliness; ongoing review, testing and reporting; and consistent offsite SEO activity.

Netregistry has a dedicated Online Marketing department which specialises in Search Engine Optimisation. If you would like Netregistry to manage your SEO campaign so you can focus on your business, learn more about SEO.

Pay Per Click advertising has many pseudonyms: PPC, search engine advertising, SEA, paid search advertising — but they all refer to the same thing. PPC is a type of online marketing available on the popular search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Google, where the advertiser only pays if their ad is clicked and a visitor arrives at their website.

The PPC ads appear alongside and above the organic search results on the search engine results pages. Major Pay Per Click advertising platforms are based on a bidding per keyword model. The advertiser simply decides which keyword phrases they would like to trigger their ads and chooses a maximum price they would be willing to pay if a visitor clicked their ad once triggered by the selected keyword.

Many different advertisers are often bidding on the same keyword and hence the bidding model is used to determine the position where the advertiser’s ad will display. Google, the largest PPC advertising channel (Google AdWords) displays a maximum of 11 ads per page. The most commonly seen arrangement of ads is three ads above the organic search results with a further 8 ads down the right hand side with position 1 being at the very top and position 11 being at the bottom of the right hand side.

The cost per click is determined by many different factors:

Number of competitors bidding for that word
Position of the ads in the search result (from 1 to 11)
The quality of the ad and relevance to the keyword
The quality of the website that users will finally end up on
The relevance of the website that users will end up on to the keyword and the ad
The click-through rate of the ad (how many people click the ad compared to how many times the ad is displayed)
In most cases the top position in the paid results is the most expensive; however other factors as listed above can mean that the highest bidder will not necessarily take the top position.

Pay Per Click advertising is available to anybody with a website or a landing page and is a highly targeted digital marketing channel. PPC advertising allows you to target users who are actively searching for keywords associated with your product, service, or business, and then only makes you pay if someone actually visits your website.

PPC advertising also allows for detailed reporting and analytics, so you can tell exactly how many people clicked your ads, what it cost and how much revenue you made. This makes it super easy to calculate your return on investment (ROI). You can set your daily or monthly budgets so that you know exactly what you are going to spend on a day-to-day basis, which makes keeping track of your advertising costs simple.

Finally, PPC advertising allows for almost immediate results. A campaign can be drafted, posted and live within a few hours — meaning that clicks and revenue can be generated in as little as a day.

Find out how you can squeeze the most out of your PPC budget with the help of Netregistry and our certified Google AdWords professionals. Learn more by clicking here.