SEM/SEO

SEO is done on websites mainly to market them. SEO is an art to rank high in the SERPs. It is like an art where there is a big mix of writing skills, programming skills and talent in linking strategies. Hiring people to work for an in-house SEO team or outsourcing SEO to a freelance SEO person or to an SEO company, may cost money.

PPC on the other hand simply paying search engines to display your websites links in the SERPs sponsored results or also called paid listings. Here you pay for every click is made by a person going to your website. And hopefully that traffic will generate into a lead or sale in order to get an ROI on advertising cost. This is a bidding type of system where certain keyphrases are bid on and the highest bidder get the highest position within the sponsored results. This can also be very costly as sometimes your target keyphrases may be in a bidding war with your main competition in the industry.

Although there are many techniques as well to minimize cost in PPC and maximize the benefits. PPC is a whole different art compared to organic SEO. And I have heard from some hardcore SEO people that 4 out of 5 people click on organic results. It is only 1 out of 5 that click on sponsored results. But also in several other studies of Internet consumers, many of the buyers do not even know what is a paid sponsored listing and what is an organic results.

For me, I believe the truth neither one is better than the other. It is really a case-to-case basis. in some websites organic search results help you convert very well, and in other websites, it is PPC. This is where you need to pay attention to the numbers. Look at the stats, and study them well to determine which method gives you more profit and adjust your time and effort and budget accordingly to maximize profits with your online marketing campaign.

PPC does not replace SEO. And SEO does not replace PPC. Both are good online marketing methods and they are designed to help each other.

To learn more about PPC and SEO, a good place to start with Aaron Wall’s SEO Book and the PPCBook Boris and Eugene Mordkovich. Novice Internet marketers will not get lost in the language discussed in these books and advanced Internet marketers will still appreciate the amount of information available in these books. They are absolutely worth checking out.

Wordpress is a very good CMS tool for SEO. Wordpress has many SEO related plugins to make SEO and maintaining content for frequently updated sites even easier. Although Wordpress was really designed to be a blog and not really designed for any other purpose although it still can be used for other purposes.

A good option is Drupal whose CMS can be optimized for SEO purposes and can be used not only for blogs, but as a full-fledge CMS system. So this can be implemented on corporate websites that have oftenly updated content but at the same time can be optimized well for SEO purposes.

If you are in search of an SEO Consulting company for Drupal Optimization, SEO Position seems to be promising, as they have existed for 5 years already and they also have they call Social Media Optimization (SMO)

PageRank is a measure of importance of a website Google uses which is a scale of 1 to 10. Where 10 is the highest. A high PR does not always assure high ranking for your targetted keywords. All other SEO factors like keyword density, code to content ratio still are what you look at in ranking, but for two websites with nearly the same value, quality, quantity in various SEO factors, the site with the higher Pagerank will most probably rank higher. Pagerank can be viewed like a measure of credibility. And if your website gets links from high PR website increase it’s own PR as well.

Pagerank if updated often, although I am not sure how often it is updated, but what is displayed on Google’s toolbar is not as updated as you think. Google Pagerank changes 3 to 4 times a year, about every 3 to 4 months. The next PR update is expected sometime this coming January 2007. To check the PR of various websites, you can simply install the latest Firefox browser with the Google toolbar. It’s a safe and secure browser and the Google toolbar will have even more useful tools aside from the Pagerank display alone.

When there is a Pagerank update, not all Google datacenters are updated right away. And my favorite Pagerank checker on various Google datacenters is here.

There also has been some reports that the Pagerank can be faked, and there are some blackhat SEO websites, blogs and forums out there saying how to cheat Google Pagerank, and basically all it is doing is displaying the Pagerank of another website and showing in the browser another website. But it has also been reported in SEO communities of Pagerank errors where some websites mysteriously get extremely low or extremely high PR for no known logical reason at all. And even I have just experienced that with another website of mine that barely has inbound links from other websites. It has large amount of internal linking all from the same domain and it was given a PR7 for some reason. Getting links from other high PR websites is the objective of many SEO professionals that they decide to buy links from other websites. While some websites who are really into SEO, willing sell links. And as the higher the Pagerank of a site gets, the higher the price get as these are very much sought after links that come from these high Pagerank good place to buy links are from Text Link Ads. They are sorted by topic and you can also view the Pagerank, Alexa traffic and all other details of the site. SEO is said to work best if the links you get are from site with similar topics.