An Introduction To Online Marketing – Part One

Most businesses in 2012 understand that they should be marketing online – people are spending increasing amounts of time online, the growing number of smartphones on the market is making mobile search more abundant and more important, and Social Media use continues to rise across all platforms.

The problem for businesses is knowing where to start, and what type of online marketing will suit them best, and give them the best chance of success.

So on this basis we plan to publish a series of regular blog posts to help businesses understand the different types of online marketing, and their subsequent benefits, in as simple terms as possible.

We will always try not to use jargon, and where we need to, we’ll do our best to explain what the jargon means!

And if there’s anything you would like more info on at any time, then please email the team at the following addresses:

matt@thebrightclick.co.uk | dan@thebrightclick.co.uk | hollie@thebrightclick.co.uk

We hope you enjoy the articles!

Online Marketing – Search Engine Listings

There are two main types of marketing approaches for search engine listings. The first is known as ORGANIC; these search engine results are natural or ‘free’ listings.

The second is PAID; search engine results appearing as paid advertisements are generally referred to as ‘sponsored links’ and usually work on a ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC) basis – ie the person who has placed the advert only pays on the occasion that the advert is clicked on by the user.

Search engines will typically rank the most relevant results at the top of the page. This is determined by the searcher’s query – the ‘keywords’ that they type in.  Depending on the search engine, the relevancy of the search is calculated in different ways – and these are changed regularly in order to continually deliver the most accurate results, and also to deter spammers or those intent on cheating their way to search engine success.

On Google, both organic and paid results will appear for the same query, however the results are separate from each other. You will see the ‘sponsored links’ as the top three results in the ‘yellow box’ at the top of Google’s search results, and also some more of these along the right-hand side of the page.

The main advantage of a PPC campaign is that the advertiser can perform well and have a strong online presence, even if their site doesn’t currently rank as well in the organic search results.

SEO

SEO is a term that you will see a lot in relation to Online Marketing – it stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is essentially the process of either creating new websites or altering existing sites in order for them to rank highly in a search engine’s organic listings, when users search on terms that are related to the site’s content.

There are two type of SEO that you will generally hear referred to – ‘On Page’ and ‘Off Page’.

‘On Page’ basically refers to getting your website as geared up as possible for Google to ‘like’ it. This means using the main keywords associated with your website regularly within the content, implementing images and labelling them correctly and accurately, using strong headings, and other factors (we will go into this in more detail in a future blog) that will all improve the ranking results of your website.

Overall, it is vital to generate engaging content and appropriate keywords in order to maximise the chances of Google ‘liking’ your site when it crawls it.

‘Off Page’ means the amount of other sites that link back to your site – and the quality of these sites.

Google has traditionally considered links to a website to be a factor of how relevant and ‘important’ that site is – if a site had lots of links to it then Google made an assumption that this added to the relevance of the site.

However over time this has led to businesses creating ‘fake’ backlinks to their site and subsequently giving them a false advantage on the search results – these results often were based more on backlinks than on content, which is of course not how it should be.

Search results were coming down to who had the most SEO ‘tricks’ rather than whether the content on the site was relevant. When you consider that the very point of Google and other search engines is to deliver the most relevant results to the searcher, then something had to change – and it has in Google’s last couple of major updates, which they codenamed ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’.

Although backlinks still play a part, they are no longer as prominent and ‘fake’ links are being stamped out by Google on daily basis, with sites utilising them being strongly penalised.

Content and relevance are now very much king in the SEO world – so having your site set up properly has never been so important.

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