General statistics have shown over the past few years that 70% of the search engine visitors will click on the Organic Listings versus 30% of visitors that will click on the sponsored listings. Most people I’ve dealt with have told me that they feel that the organic listings are “unbiased” listings and therefore are more relevant. The truth is that companies are investing money to optimize their web sites and develop strategies to make sure their listings are at the top of the organic listings for their search words and phrases.

While there are benefits to both search engine strategies, one requires a payment every time someone clicks on the link to your site while the other doesn’t require a fee for each click, but could require monthly fees to get your site ranked at the top and keep it there.

Other Things to Consider

Pay Per Click advertising simply requires setting up accounts with Yahoo and Google and creating ads and setting bids for your keywords and phrases. It takes a minimal amount of time and your ads could be online within as little as an hour. The organic listings on the other hand take quite a while to integrate (Google can take up to 6 months to get a real hold on the placement) and you need to understand much more about the algorithmic methods of the search engines so you can change your site and make the engines take notice.

The following is a breakdown as to how the engines rank web sites organically and what you need to do to optimize your site to get it ranked higher in the engines.

Pay per click ads are sponsored listings paid for by advertisers. The placement of the links shown above is determined by bids made by the advertiser. The highest bid receives the highest placement in the sponsored area on the page. What the advertisers are bidding on are the click thru charges on the link.

So, when a visitor sees the listings in the page above and clicks on a link in the sponsored area, the advertiser is charged a fee each time that link is clicked on. The amount they are charged is their bid. So, if the sponsor in the first position bid $5.00 per click thru and visitors click on the link 10 times, that advertiser is charged $50.00. The advertiser below that would bid $4.95, then the one below that might bid $4.80 and so on.

There is no guarantee that the advertiser will get business from the visitor, but they did drive a visitor to their site. In the example above, TargetEm is bidding more than any of the other advertisers for the search phrase “search engine optimization.”

In contrast to the pay per click listings, the organic listings are the middle listings (represented above by a Wikipedia listing). Why is the Wikipedia listing #1 in the example above? This is a great question. The organic listings are sorted in order by the search engines based on the engines’ own custom created algorithms which means Google, Yahoo and MSN all use different methods for determining which web sites will be ranked at the top (see “How Do Search Engines Determine Organic Listings” area below).

Of all of the marketing techniques used to promote web sites, search engines are the best and most effective way to bring traffic to your web site.

The Players

When the internet became popular in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, there were numerous search engines making names for themselves: Infoseek, Looksmart, Excite, Yahoo, AltaVista, Dogpile and more you may or may not have heard of. However, over the years, the dot com bubble burst and many of these engines were acquired and the business of searches was consolidated. Today, there are three main players in the search engine space:

· Google
· Yahoo!
· MSN.com
· Ask.com (not a huge player)

Based on current internet statistics, Google has been steadily increasing its presence on the internet and the number of searches through Google has increased every year. In 2006, Google was processing approximately 55% of all searches done online. According to the August, 2007 Internet Usage report from Hitwise (www.hitwise.com), the following are the number of searches performed through the various search engines:

· Google: 64.14%
· Yahoo: 22.88%
· MSN.com: 6.59%
· Ask.com: 3.35%
· TOTAL: 96.96%

As you can see, Google is far and away the leader when it comes to the shear number of searches done online every day. Therefore, when we focus on search engine marketing, we are really creating campaigns for these search engines only.

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