Paid Search Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation

Before embarking on a Paid Search Marketing (PSM) campaign it is advisable to fine tune your website for search engine optimisation (SEO). This article outlines how search engines manage to rank websites and what you might try in order to improve your ranking.

There are two ways to improve site rankings. These are the nice way in which you are open and play fair, and the bad way in which you try every trick in the book to fool the search engine into giving you a higher ranking than you deserve.

Search engines dislike displaying pages with higher rankings than they deserve as this means that people will follow useless links and blame the search engines. This is a quick way to lose customers. They will do everything in their power to detect the SEO cheats and when they do they will be sent to the back of the class so it is vital that decent PPC software is used.

The Bad Way: Two famous examples of the bad way of influencing search engines are what is called Google Bombing (or Link Bombing), and Spamdexing. Google bombing employs the anchor text of hyperlinks to fool the search engine. The anchor text could be a phrase totally unrelated to the link destination. Of course it is necessary to ensure that this is repeated many times across the web. For instance the anchor text could contain derogatory words and the link could go to a politician's website. This technique can be used commercially too. Spamdexing is a technique of increasing rankings by repeating keywords many times on a page in a manner that is invisible to the reader but visible to the search engine. Other techniques involve creating multiple links on the internet with many interlinked pages, invisible links, and false websites. Search engines do all they can to detect these scams and de-rank the perpetuators accordingly, though new ways of fooling them are being invented perpetually.

The Good Way: Follow the guidelines laid out by the search engines. All the major search engines now publish what it looks for in a website. These are essentially what any professional web designer would consider good practice and deception free. Content, transparency and structure are key elements. The good way will lead to long term business with good customer relations. The bad way will achieve the opposite.