PPC vs. Organic SEO

Why do more netizens and internet newbies utilize Google to search for products, services, images, information, news, or anything else under the proverbial internet superhighway sun? Well, Google’s search technology has been proven smarter (in the minds of the average web surfer) than the rest in regards to returning relevant, valuable, and fast results for any given search query - this would explain the almost 50% market share that Google now commands for online search.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bet the farm on the quality of their search, and it has paid off marvelously in stock options and an almost inconceivable market capitalization (142.58 as of April 1, 2007) for a company that has been in existence for less than a decade. Google’s immense market cap is partially a product of its revenue stream, but where in fact does Google actually generate the bulk of their proceeds from?

Gmail, website analytics, images, web searches, all can be performed for free (provided you are among the over 1 billion humans who have access to an internet connection and a PC). The answer is advertising. And not just any old type of advertising - Google generates up to 95% of its revenue from what is known as Pay Per Click advertising; specifically it is the Google Adwords and Adsense suite of programs.

Google Adwords enables businesses, young and old alike, to infuse their advertising message to the masses. Adwords works like a standard auction. Businesses bid on keywords that are relevant to their industry. The highest bidders, who also maintain a high advertisement Click Through Rate (CTR), appear towards the top of the screen when conducting a search. Lower bidders get the lower valued placement real estate as web surfers’ eyes scroll down the browser window. Google monitors the ads, but it is the business owner who chooses what amount he or she is willing to pay per click. Once your ad is clicked by a user, your business is charged a certain amount relating to your bid price. You, the business owner essentially choose where your advertisement is displayed and for what keyword or keyword phrases to be included.
Who Controls What I See When I Conduct A Google Search?
Now, this brings up my initial, yet critical point. I will say it again. Businesses (and individuals) have the power to place their unique message or advertisement on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS). What is the big deal about that? Well, internet surfers tend to have difficulty discerning between advertisements and actually search engine listing results. Try it for yourself. Go to Google and conduct a search for “AT&T cordless phone.” The first three listings you see are not listings at all- they are Google Adwords results - Google typically shades these “sponsored” results to help differentiate them from the actual organic or natural search engine listings, but they are still shown in similar formats. Even this advertisement shading in the last few weeks however, has slowly been supplanted by a crystal clear background which makes the advertisements and listings almost indistinguishable. Besides the shading and the conspicuously grayed out and small “sponsored results” text the two “listings” and “advertisements” look very similar. In other words, most web surfers could confuse an advertisement for an actual and factual ultra-democratic Google certified search result. The more web surfers that click on Google Adwords advertisements, the more money Google generates, keeping the board of directors and stock holders sleeping soundly tucked in Egyptian cotton.

Isn’t that directly contrary to Google’s mantra that its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?” The answer is yes, but don’t tear down the walls of the kingdom just yet. Most of the businesses that advertise on Google are legitimate - the point is that when you click on a PPC link, the quality of the site cannot be vouched for by Google. When you click on the first organic search engine listing from a Google query, you are implicitly getting Google’s stamp of approval that this site is the best result as per your associated search based on their algorithm or rules. The push vs. pull reasoning that I have read in various search engine forums and articles may be completely off base. If you don’t know that you are clicking on an advertisement then you are not being pushed to take an action. So, what does all this mean?
Educated Web Surfers Or Buyers Know The Difference Between A Pay Per Click Advertising And A Natural Search Engine Listing.
I have found that educated internet users tend to utilize the organic search engine listings more than the pay per click results (both Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture - now Yahoo Search Marketing). They do so because they understand that the sponsored results are all businesses that have chosen to be listed among the SERPS. Organic results are also different because a lower percentage of these are actual businesses selling goods or services. Google and Yahoo organic results give precedent to valuable web pages - pages that give information, tools, or news to web surfers. There is no guarantee that your search for “AT&T cordless phone” would bring up anything more than a website with a schematic of transistors and speed dial features. Educated buyers comprehend that the first few organic results that are in fact businesses providing what they need will most likely be the most reputable companies around. This fact is indeed more consistent with the Google corporate philosophy. As we have just seen, Pay Per Click “PPC” advertisements and natural results do put forth two conflicting messages - click on the listing because it is relevant, or click on the advertisement because Google has to pay its utility bills.
What Does All This Have To Do With My Business?
I’ve looked at hundreds of Overture and Adwords reports; I usually see an average PPC advertisement click through rate of between 1- 4% (although inter-industry numbers vary dramatically). I also study statistics (often from the analytical tool called Google Analytics) that shows me the number of visitors a site gets for both PPC and natural search engine listings. My findings show that organic listings on the average drive more traffic than PPC ads. This isn’t always the case, but it is the trend I have seen when analyzing the data. If educated surfers are more likely to click on natural search engine listings, it also seems logical to think that the website conversion rates would also be higher. My look at the numbers do suggest that this is true more times than not. Does Google publicize the click through rate or conversion rate for typical organic search queries? No way - that may encourage businesses to utilize natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies as opposed to PPC advertising programs. That wouldn’t be so good for Page, Brin, or Dr. Eric Schmidt (Google CEO).
Does That Make Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing Definitively Bad?
Now, I own stocks, bonds, CDs - and an occasional mutual fund - my financial portfolio is diversified. Diversifying your business’s advertising is something that I also advocate. If PPC advertising is reaping a profit for you, then by all means, continue to utilize this valuable service. What I am suggesting is that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If a search engine rule or algorithm changes, your organic search engine rankings may drop, costing you revenue and potential profit. If a new player enters your industry and decides to outbid your PPC advertisements, you will also be pushed down in the search engine shuffle - again affecting your business’s bottom line. I don’t recommend having an undiversified financial portfolio, nor do I recommend obtaining all your search engine traffic from the same source. Experiment with Overture or Adwords, and talk to an ethical search engine optimization firm to find out if organic optimization makes sense for your organization.

--------
by Brian Ortiz is the CEO of SEOMatrix: Ethical Search Engine Optimization.

The Newbie Guide to Online Marketing Terms

In all forms of business, and even hobbies, the people who have been involved in a particular activity for awhile will start to use different slang terms. When someone new comes along these slang terms can be very confusing. As all businesses depend on customers, you need to be careful and educate yourself on these terms so you don’t lose any sales.

It recently came to my attention that online marketing has more than its share of slang for the newbie to learn. Since marketing is all about getting and keeping customers, I could see that seasoned online marketers may start have an image problem. Online marketing slang was pointed out to me by an associate who was interested in an Internet business I was marketing. While I was talking to him he asked for an explanation of what the heck I was talking about and said “Speak English Boy!”

That conversation allowed the light to click on for me and I decided to write this short guide to online marketing slang. This should help anyone who is new to the online marketing arena understand some basic terms.

1. Online Marketing - Is the selling of any product or service on the Internet. Marketing is just the act of promoting and selling something. Selling on the Internet costs much less than having a real world, bricks and mortar business. It’s this low cost of entry which is attractive in starting your own online business.

2. Joint Ventures - A joint venture is a partnership. Simply put 2 or more people work together to increase their sales, or to complete a product or service. Sometimes shortened to JV, joint ventures are often very profitable.

3. Subscriber List - This is sometimes known as an email list, or an ezine list (ezine is short for electronic magazine). It’s also a list of people who have given permission for the marketer to send them emails, which may contain advertising. This is also known as an opt-in list, because subscribers opt-in to receive the emails. This prevents people from complaining that an email is Spam as there will be a record of them agreeing to receive the emails. Another snippet of slang is double opt-in, which just means after filling out a form, the potential subscriber will receive an email asking them to verify that they agree to accept future emails before they are actually added to the email list to receive them.

4. Viral Marketing - This little phrase is used to describe a way of increasing your business, or website reach, by using a “viral technique.” In real life a virus spreads out by people contacting one another, and computer viruses are spread by computers contacting other computers. Some clever Internet gurus realized they could use the power of people to send each other information, and then watched that information spread in the same way as a virus. Giving away a free gift, which contains a link to your business, and allowing others to give it away too will work like a virus spreading the word to others as people send it on to their friends. This works long as your freebie was something people would give away anyway in the first place.

5. Niche Marketing - This is the act of selling to a particular group of people. There are lots of untapped niches (small groups interested in a specific subject) who are willing to pay for information. Online, it’s easy to target these small markets by monitoring search engine results and then finding a specific word or phrase which is being searched for but not near the top of the list of popular searches. An example of a niche market is poodle owners, they are dog owners, but will specifically search for information about poodles. These markets can be profitable because they are not targeted directly by many people, so if you have a product tailored to a niche market you may have little or no competition.

6. EBook - Although getting more popular this term still causes some confusion. An ebook is an electronic book, it can be a .pdf file, plain text file or an executable file (one which is actually a self contained program to run on your computer). Ebooks sell well online, as there is no shipping, and delivery is instant.

7. MLM - These are the initials of one of the least understood, and most maligned of business models, Multi Level Marketing. Sometimes known as network marketing or referral marketing, MLM is an ideal business model for online marketers because of the ease of getting out the message about a new business and the low cost of advertising online. The problem with MLM is that it is also easy to mistake MLM for a pyramid scheme (also called a Ponzi). Many unscrupulous people will sell pyramid schemes as an MLM opportunity. What they are selling is basically just a money game. The big difference is that a genuine Multi-Level Marketing program has a worthwhile product that you are selling and money is made by referring other members to sell the same product. Pyramid schemes will usually have a worthless product or no product at all, and pays current members from new members joining. There are many legit MLM companies out there where millions have been made.

If you are new to the world of online marketing, I hope these short explanations will help you understand some of the terms the seasoned online marketer says or writes. If you’re a seasoned marketer, maybe you will try to introduce your business to the newbie with less of the jargon we seasoned marketers take for granted.

----------
by Chad William Hershey of ManifestYourFortune is founder of his own home based business,

Is Ask.com Deceiving UK Searchers ?

Ask.com has gotten a lot of press (and backlash) over the guerrilla Information Revolution marketing campaign that’s been running in the United Kingdom lately. It’s a 6-week campaign masked as a grassroots effort to bring awareness to Google’s monopolization of search and encourage searchers to try out other engines. Google currently enjoys 75 percent of UK search market share

It’s gotten quite a bit of coverage, but in case you missed it, over the past few weeks, Ask.com has been employing both guerrilla and traditional media tactics to get their message out and point searchers to InformationRevolution.org to learn about the movement, receive a free T-shirt and leave comments on the site’s message board.

All in all, a campaign to raise awareness about all the other engines out there that are overlooked because of searchers “sleep searching” and blindly using Google is a positive thing, right? Google’s a great engine, but it doesn’t have to be your everything. Unless they’ve given you a three-stone ring, it’s okay to try out other suitors. The site lets users easily experiment with a new engine and search on either Google, Yahoo, Ask.com or Live.

The problem with Ask’s campaign is that they don’t clearly state that they, Ask,com, a Google competitor, is the one behind it. Kinda sketchy. And now they’re taking a lot of slack for it, including today’s very public hand slap from the Wall Street Journal. You can’t blame users for reacting the way they have. It’s natural that when they discovered what they thought was a natural forming, underground campaign based around information is actually a cleverly disguised attempt to promote Ask.com, they’re going to be less than impressed. Ask has made them feel tricked, deceived, and lots of other non-warm-and-fuzzy things, probably not the aftertaste Ask was hoping to leave.

It’s a shame because the message Ask was trying to get out is an important one. Living in a world where one engine “controls” all the information is a dangerous idea and, frankly, gives Google an enormous amount of power. Unfortunately, that message is now totally lost on an audience who feels like they were duped by a company just trying to promote their own product. Right now, Ask.com has lost its ability to leverage this in a positive light. And it is users who will miss out because Ask really is a great engine. It may never replace Google as your steady, but for some queries, Ask really does provide better, more relevant results.

To be fair, the InformationRevolution.org site does contain an Ask.com logo in the bottom right hand corner, but it’s small and not overly noticeable. And if you don’t immediately recognize the photo of Apostolos Gerasoulis (Team Eli!), you probably miss the affiliation completely. I really think this was an oversight on Ask’s part. Now, instead of being a powerful branding campaign, it came off as a jealous Anti-Google smear campaign, especially when searching on Ask.com for “google” used to bring up a Smart Answer accusing searchers of being puppets. (Fortunately, this has since been taken down.) Not cool.

I also don’t think Ask.com intended to deceive users. I actually think the extent of backlash they’ve received has been somewhat unwarranted. They made a mistake but they weren’t intentionally being malicious. I have to wonder, if Google had launched a similar campaign or launched a movement to take away some of Microsoft’s presence in the office suite world, would we be talking about this right now? Probably not. We just would have laughed. But Ask isn’t Google, and that’s the problem.

The ad agency responsible for Ask’s campaign said they felt Ask.com had “nothing to lose” by running the campaign since Google is so much bigger. I think the fallout has proved that statement to be 100 percent false. By appearing deceptive, they’ve lost a lot of potential users, broken the trust of existing users, and probably tainted their overall impression in the United Kingdom. When you’re struggling for market share, you can’t afford to alienate people. It’s that make new friends, but keep the old lesson we talked about yesterday. Ask.com now has some major reputation management work to do in the UK.

Without a doubt, Ask.com made a mistake by not advertising they were the ones behind the campaign. If they wanted to raise awareness, then they’ve done that. People are talking about it. But if they wanted to promote Ask.com as an alternative to Google, I think they did themselves a great disservice by hiding, or at least not promoting, the fact that they were the so-called Information Revolution. They got a revolution, just not the one they were going for.

----------
Author: Lisa Barone is a Sr. Writer at Bruce Clay Inc.

Advanced Link Building: Hosted Content, The Quest for the Perfect Link

Ask Google, search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others. For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn’t have as much value to search engines and so, it doesn’t receive the same weíght as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link – the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.
Article Syndication
In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offër these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the “about the author” section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the frëe use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.
Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It’s a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.
The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author’s site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links – somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.
In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author’s site. It’s still more valuable than a plain link exchange, but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what’s a site owner to do?
Hosted Web Content
It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content – all basically the same idea.
The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the “eyes” of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.
Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hostíng site get useful content.
This strategy isn’t new. It’s simply doing what search engines want us to do – produce content that’s useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.
Designing a Hosted Content Page
You’re paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.
Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword savvy title, header

, subheads and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be “spamish” regardless of where the content appears.
Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article’s text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it’s also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hostíng your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offër real value to readers.
It’s Not Quantity, It’s Quality
It’s no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It’s not quantity, it’s the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.
Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more “natural” from a search engine’s perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site’s pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links - the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.
Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today
It’s being done everyday, successfully building small sites into largër sites, providing frëe advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hostíng site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers – exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards – so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.
Start searching for websites that might be interested in hostíng your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that’s unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won’t even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers – exactly how it should be.

------
by Frederick Townes in the owner of W3-EDGE.

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.
The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”
You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.
The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.
Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.
There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.
Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.
Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.
Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.
The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!
Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.
This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.
The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.
It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.
To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.
Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

-----
by Vern Black is the owner of Pinnacle Publishing,

Retailers Count on Search Driving Sales

A new study by Internet Retailer shows retail sites will be investing more on organic SEO and paid search. Major findings include:

Search engine marketing drives over 50 percent of sales for 30.2 percent of the survey respondents. This amounts to about 80 retailers out of a total sample of 245. The 50 percent figure coincides with earlier studies.
You won’t see any reductions in paid search advertising as 82.8 percent of respondents said they would not reduce overall PPC spending this year.
57.4 percent of respondents said search engine marketing performs better, or somewhat better, than other marketing media, including email, affiliate marketing and direct mail. Only 12.7 percent said it performs worse.
While more retailers prefer PPC to SEO for driving traffic (39.2 percent), another 34.7 percent indicated a preference for SEO over PPC. A savvy 26.1 percent use both SEO and PPC equally.

Retailers believe SEO delivers better conversions (46.1 percent), while a lesser number (37.3 percent) believe PPC is better, and 16.6 percent think SEO and PPC perform equally well.

Organic SEO
Optimizing their SEO campaigns is a high priority for most retailers. One reason is the rising cost of PPC. Retailers will improve their natural rankings on Google, Yahoo and other search engines as follows:
· 80.9 percent plan to rewrite keyword descriptions on the home page and product pages to achieve higher rankings.
· 67.9 percent will include the actual phrases commonly used in search queries on product pages.
· 58.1 percent will include common product keywords in image file names and in image display captions.
· 61.8 percent plan to improve overall site navigation.
This makes sense since 70 percent of traffic is generated by organic links while the other 30 percent comes from PPC traffic.
Paid Search
Most retailers will spend more rather than less on paid search.
· 58.5 percent will spend more on paid search this year
· 32.8 percent will stick to current budgets.
· 8.7 percent will cut back.
What search engines deliver the best ROI?
· 79 percent said Google produces the best ROI.
· 13 percent prefer Yahoo.
· 4 percent like Microsoft Live Search
· 2 percent count on AOL.
Source: Internet Retailer

-------

By Paul Bruemmer

Mobile Search Site Creation and Optimization

The following is coverage of the Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York presentation called “Mobile Search Optimization” by Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works, Gregory Markel, President of Infuse Creative LLC and Rachel Pasqua, Director of Mobile Marketing at iCrossing.

This presentation provided a fascinating glimpse into the young realm of mobile site creation, compliance and optimization. I have a lot of information to work with here so to make this article a little more digestible I have broken it into two parts; one is the site creation and the second is the site optimization.
Mobile Website Design & Creation

During this presentation two very different lines of thought were noted regarding the best method for creating a mobile website, one from Cindy Krum and the other from Rachel Pasqua.

> Cindy Krum’s Presentation
Cindy Krum felt strongly that an existing website should pull double-duty as both the wired and the mobile version by using CSS to provide an alternative, mobile friendly version shown only to mobile users.
Cindy provided some great tips on how to create a hybrid mobile/wired website:
1. Ensure your website is 100% W3C XHTML compliant because mobile browsers are completely unforgiving when it comes to improper coding.
2. Follow strict XHTML accessibility guidelines to provide the best quality product for both wired, mobile, and those that require accessibility (i.e. the blind). She also noted that by following accessibility requirements any images that do not show up on the mobile browser will be defined in text format – a nice backup.
3. Avoid unnecessary code to minimize download times.
4. Ensure the site uses CSS to control content – this is critical to ensure the mobile version can have reorganized placement of content. (i.e. the menu might be at the bottom vs. the top)
5. Use external CSS files to provide maximum flexibility such as the ability to specify a different style sheet for each mobile browser.
6. Use the LINK element to attach style sheets because it is a much friendlier format for mobile browsers.
7. Use multiple style sheets. The minimum would be a style sheet called “screen” for regular wired visitors and a second style sheet (provided below the first) called “handheld”.
8. Use “display: none” to hide elements in either rendering. This is useful if you have page elements you do not want to appear to mobile users or vice versa. Using this method of hiding content is part of what makes Cindy’s hybrid approach feasible of using a single website for both viewing technologies (handheld, and wired).
9. These headers will help you identify the mobile device being used to access the content. HTTP User-Agent headers, HTTP Accept Headers, and UAProf.
10. Use the appropriate MIME type: “text/html” or “application/xhtml+xml”.
> Rachel Pasqua’s Presentation
At the opposite spectrum was Rachel Pasqua who firmly stated that offering your current website to users, reformatted or not, would likely provide a less than desirable user experience. She went on to explain that mobile users should see an entirely different, more time efficient version of your website because such users are task oriented. Rachel put her thoughts into excellent perspective when she stated that mobile search is “not surf media, it’s search media”. She also went on to state that iCrossing decided to proceed with the subdomain concept rather than a separate domain such as a .mobi. In this case their mobile site is located at mobile.icrossing.com; a sensible concept that retained the branding of the top level domain name without having to rebrand a new one (i.e. going with the .mobi version)
Rachel had some interesting metrics and tips to share with the group that were researched at iCrossing using focus groups and other research (sorry I don’t know the source but the report is due to be released soon I hear). Here are a few tidbits that I caught on paper:
1. Mobile searchers tend to utilize the same search engine they use when they are on their PC.
2. Only 10% of the estimated 234 million US wireless subscribers are active users of mobile search.
3. Searchers are task oriented, they tend to want to get their information and get out; mobile surfing is extremely uncommon.
My Take on Hybrid Sites Versus A Separate Mobile Website

Of the two beliefs I felt myself more strongly drawn to the concept of a separate mobile site. Why? I think the maintenance of a hybrid website is bound to be far more difficult because design updates will require designers to think in both realms which is likely to make updates laborious for the average business owner.
> Gregory Markel’s Presentation

Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative LLC, dropped a very intriguing bombshell at the beginning of his discussion when he noted that Google’s Voice Local Search just might take the world of mobile search in an entirely different direction. According to Gregory, his friends and network of mobile enthusiasts have been impressed by the results of using 800-GOOG-411 and conducting a free voice search; the results have been extremely relevant and Google immediately connects the user to their preferred result by phone. After this bombshell had sunk in, he went on to discuss many of the points already mentioned by Cindy but he had a few highlights definitely worth mentioning including this valuable tip: get into Google local for your area so that you can be found on Google’s Voice Local Search, it is free and easy to do. (Note, I wrote an article on how to do this a few months back called: Have Your Company Listed Free in Google Maps). Unfortunately, Google Voice Local Search is experimental and only available in the United States.

Highlights from Markel:
1. Mobile search adoption has been slower in the US than expected at only 19%
2. An excellent source of mobile statistics is the self-described authority on mobile metrics, MMetrics.com.
3. When users conduct searches, they are more likely to search using 2 or a maximum of 3 words.
4. Nokia has decided to try to simplify the process of searching by integrating it into its future line of cell phones.
5. Mobile devices require ultimate simplicity to ensure compatibility across the vast number of proprietary mobile browsers available.

-------
By Ross Dunn