The Search Engine Google - Term Paper Example

Search Engines as an Advertisement Tool A search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the internet. The three most popular search engines of today are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Other search engines include Lycos, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, Netscape, Earthlink, Ask Jeeves, and thousands of smaller and less popular search engines. Of primary importance is Google, which holds about a quarter of the search engine market—that is, 75% of the people who use search engines rely on Google to search for what they want (Kent, 2004 pp. 9-10). For this reason, this report will be focusing on the search engine Google as an example. Another reason that we use Google is that it also provides results to other “partner” search engines and website directories, so a well-advertised position or number 1 ranking in Google will mostly land a number 1 ranking in other search engines such as Yahoo, Lycos, AOL, NetScape, EarthLink, and MSN as well (Sisson, 2006 p.9). Search engines are a unique and effective way to advertise. They provide targeted advertising and can bring in specific types of customers. Search engines are advantageous because they allow you to sell “what your customers want, when they want it” (Wall, 2006 pp. 8-9). For example, when you are looking to buy a certain book, you can just type the title on Google.com, and the results will display websites and online stores where you can buy the book., as well as other related results that you might be interested in. Two Ways to Advertise on Search Engines When using search engines, you will notice that there are two types of search results. One is the organic search result, and the other is the sponsored listing or paid advertisements. These are the two ways by which we can use search engines in order to advertise. First, let us define what each method of advertising in search engine entails, then dig deeper into how to use each method to promote a product or a company. Organic search results are displayed based on the relevance of a page to a search term. Search engines use complicated software algorithms to determine which page is more relevant for a specific word or phrase. The results are arranged according to their relevance, the first one on the list being the most relevant. Of course, this system is not perfect, and search engines are regularly improving their algorithms to provide the most relevant results. It is interesting to take note that organic search results can be influenced in such a way that a website will rank high for particular search words or search phrases. There is a system called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), where several factors are being optimized by professional Search Engine Optimization Specialists (SEO Specialists) in order to make the website rank high for particular search terms. Online businesses world-wide rely on SEO as one of the most reliable, cost-effective, and efficient ways to advertise. In a survey of over 400 businesses, it was found that a majority relied on SEO and found it to have one of the highest Return on Investment (ROI) (Odden, 2008). The effects of SEO are for the long term. An initial investment spent to hire an SEO Specialist can guarantee a steady stream of hundreds and even thousands of interested customers every month. Sponsored listing or paid advertisements, on the other hand, are displayed based on how much their advertisers are willing to spend. The advertiser willing to pay more to be advertised will end up at the top of the list. For every click or for every 1000 views of their advertisement, a corresponding fee will be charged. Advertisers can set a budget, of say $500 a month, so that their advertisements will be displayed on search engines. Unlike in media or other forms of advertisement, paid advertising in search engines is very targeted. That is, the advertisements displayed are related to the search terms inputted by the one who is searching for a product or information. If someone searches for “Spiderman movie”, then the paid advertisements that will be displayed are websites that sell or provide information about movies. Unlike SEO, search engine paid advertisements are for short term goals. In the long run, it is more expensive than organic advertising since it requires a monthly budget, and the number of viewers is dependent on how large that budget is. Search Engine Optimization – Organic Advertisement David Chaffey, in Search Engine Optimization Best Practices, discusses how you can improve several factors in a business website in order to become advertised better in organic search results (2008). It is shown that someone who is not technically knowledgeable on internet technologies can still apply search engine optimization techniques. Thus, search engine optimization is a good option for advertising, since it can be done by almost anyone as long as he has the time to learn a few things about SEO. Two of the most important popular primers for SEO can be downloaded for free: SEO Fast Start by Dan Thies (2007), and SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen (2008). Anyone aiming to start a business online can make use of these references even without requiring a high level of IT-related knowledge. On average, only 16% of search engine marketing budget is spent for SEO or organic search advertising. This is not because SEO is ineffective, but rather, because non-organic or paid-search advertisement is easier to do. The problem with paid-search advertisement is that paid-search costs money each time someone visits your website (Chaffey, 2008). Thus, SEO is the wiser choice in the long term perspective. SEO First Stage: Keyword Research Search Engine Optimization involves a series of processes. The first step is Keyword Research. It is the foundation of Search Engine Optimization on which all the other steps will rely on. Keyword research is the process used to select what words or keyphrases to target. A keyphrase or keyword is simply the word or phrase typed by people who use search engines to look for something. Keyword research means choosing keywords that people actually search for and ensuring that people who search for these keywords convert to interested customers and buyers. The things to consider here are how many people search for the keyphrase, how long it will take to optimize for a keyphrase, and how strong the competition is (Callen, 2008). Keyword research, aside from being used in Search Engine Optimization to influence the organic results of Search Engines, is also a crucial step for search engine paid advertisements. The tools that can be used for this stage are Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Good Keywords, and Wordtracker (Thies, 2007). These are tools that can be used for free, or as a demo, to discover which keywords you can target to rank high for both in organic search as well as paid search advertisement. Simply type a word, product, or service you are interested in, and these tools will generate related keyphrases and detail how many people search for these keyphrases every month. For example, if you own a site selling pets, say, specifically cats, you can type in “cats” on Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It will reveal that 450,000 people search for “cat food” each month, 60,000 people search for “cats for sale”, 18,000 people search for “tabby cats”, and so on. The keyphrase “cats for sale” is the most related to the cat website. If we type that again on Google Adwords Keyword Tool, it will reveal keyphrases such as “siamese cats for sale”, “ragdoll cats for sale”, “persian cats for sale”, “exotic cats for sale”, and so on. Generally, as a rule, we do not target very competitive keywords such as “cats” or “cats for sale” at the beginning. We target less competitive and longer keyphrases first since they are the ones that will convert to more visitors in the shortest amount of time. The idea is to first promote for these longer keywords, and then once the website is receiving a small steady stream of visitors, you can start targeting more competitive keyphrases such as “cats” and “cats for sale” (Callen, 2008). SEO Second Stage: Onpage Optimization The next step is onpage optimization, where the website structure, content, and link text are optimized. The title and description of the website is important, as well as the headings, the layout, and whether or not the images are named properly. Purely Flash—that is, animated , non-text websites—and javascript websites are avoided since search engines can’t analyze such websites very well. The keyphrases that we learned from the Keyword Research stage of SEO will play a big role here. Optimizing for the wrong keywords will get you little or no results, the right keywords to target at the start should be several variations of longer and less competitive keyphrases. In onpage optimization, these keyphrases should be sprinkled naturally across the page. That is, it should not be repeated excessively. Stating it once or twice in the title, headings, links, and the content of the page should be enough. They should not appear like SPAM content, or content that has no important value. It is often said that in SEO, content is king, so the quality of the content should be high and written for human beings, not just for search engines (Callen, 2008). SEO Third Stage: Offpage Optimization After onpage optimization comes offpage optimization. Offpage optimization consists mainly of acquiring links to the website we are trying to advertise. The basic idea is that the more links that point to a website from other websites, the more reliable that site will appear to search engines. There are several techniques that can be applied here such as directory submissions, article submissions, and social bookmarking. In offpage optimization, the important factors are the quantity of the links and the quality of the links. The quality of the link refers to whether or not it is related to the website, and whether or not the keywords are used on the link text (Sisson, 2006). Factors such as the PageRank of the page on which the link is on are also important. The PageRank is Google’s way of rating the importance of a page, and is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the highest PageRank. The more links point to a website, the higher the PageRank of that page. The more high PageRank pages link to a website, then the higher the PageRank of that page. Directories are websites that list different websites into categories. An example of a directory would be Yahoo. Unfortunately, to get into Yahoo’s directory, you will need to pay more than $200 a year. Still, there are thousands of smaller directories that you can submit your site to for free. Having submitted a site to a directory means that you will gain a link back to your site for every directory you submitted to. Perhaps the most important of these directories is Google’s DMOZ.org. Submitting to DMOZ means that not only will you get a link from DMOZ.org, but also hundreds of links from Google’s partner websites (Sisson, 2006). Article submissions are similar to directory submissions, but this time, you submit an article with a link to your site at the end of the text. There are free websites that publish your articles for free. People who find that article useful may also repost it on their websites, provided that they do not change any part, so you get additional links to your website. With this, you can get hundreds of links to your site and this will help promote your search engine rankings (Sisson, 2006). Social Bookmarking sites are sites such as Digg, Del.i.cio.us, Technorati, and so on. These sites allow you to bookmark the pages that you like, wherever you are. They also allow you to sort your bookmarked pages according to tags, so it will be easier to recall a certain site that you liked according to the word or words that you associated with the bookmarked page. Other people discover what interesting things you have bookmarked, and if they liked it too, they will also end up bookmarking them. Each bookmark will serve as a link to your website. The more people that bookmark your website, the more popular your website will be (Chaffey, 2008). In offpage Search Engine Optimization, it takes quite a while before we see significant results. It usually takes three to six months for the full effects of SEO to be felt, time enough for the search engines to index and analyze your pages. Even with this, it is interesting to take note that in the survey of 400 businesses, the majority of business owners found SEO to be number one in terms of ROI. Furthermore, basic SEO can be done even with little budget. If you or one of your staff has free time, basic SEO can be implemented on your website (Odden, 2008). Step 4: Monitoring Results and Refining Strategy After you’ve applied Search Engine Optimization to your websites, the results will gradually show within the span of 3-6 months. For more competitive keyphrases, it may even take a year, even two (Sisson, 2006). Some of the tools that can be used to monitor the results of your efforts are Google Analytics to measure the amount of people visiting the site, Alexa to measure the Alexa Rank which helps determine its commercial value, Google Toolbar to measure PageRank, among other useful and free tools. Based on these results, you can then decide which strategies worked best and focus on those strategies. Promoting yourself to search engines is a continuous process. The more you apply SEO, the higher your rankings will be, and the easier it will be to promote your newer websites. Presence builds on presence (Callen, 2008). Search Engine Sponsored Listings – Paid Advertisement Paid search advertisement delivers results quickly, compared to SEO which takes months before results will be felt. On the long run, however, they are more expensive since you have to pay for every visitor that will come to your site (Chaffey, 2008). It is still useful to rely on paid-search advertisements, especially when you are still beginning to promote your website through SEO. One reliable way to advertise would be Google Adwords. These are contextual ads, that is, for every page on the internet that displays a Google advertisement, Google analyzes the contents of that page and displays the most relevant ads. So you get a high chance that a visitor will click on your advertisement, since the ads are related to the page that he’s interested in (Chaffey, 2008) In conclusion, both organic search (Search Engine Optimization) and paid-search should be used in search engine advertising. Paid-search advertisement is useful at the beginning. For the long term, however, applying SEO to a website will be more cost-effective and will deliver greater results. Search engine advertising is advantageous over other forms of advertising because it is targeted and has a high conversion rate. Works Cited Callen, B. (2008). SEO Made Easy. Bryxen.Software. Chaffey, D. (2008). Search Engine Optimization Best Practices. Bradford, West Yorkshire. Chaffey, D. (2006). E-business and e-commerce management. Bradford, West Yorkshire. Kent, P. (2004). Search engine optimization for dummies. Wiley, New Jersey. Odden, L. (2008). SEO tops recession. 13 Oct. 2008. TopRankBlog. 10 March 2009. Sisson, D. (2006). Search engine optimization secrets. Blue Moose Web Works, Washington. Thies, D. (2007). SEO Fast Start 2007. SEO Fast Start. Wall, A. (2006). Search engine optimization book. State College, PA. Read More