SEO vs. Paid Ads: Unveiling the Battle for Online Visibility

 In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the debate between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Advertising continues to captivate marketers and business owners alike. Both strategies aim to enhance online visibility, attract traffic, and ultimately drive conversions, but they employ distinct approaches and have unique advantages and limitations. To navigate this dynamic terrain effectively, it's essential to understand the nuances of SEO and Paid Ads comprehensively.

Understanding SEO:

SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in organic search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves various techniques, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and content creation. Unlike paid advertising, SEO focuses on earning visibility through relevance, authority, and user experience.

Advantages of SEO:

1. Long-term Sustainability: One of the primary benefits of SEO is its sustainability over time. While it may take longer to see significant results compared to paid ads, a well-executed SEO strategy can yield enduring benefits, driving consistent organic traffic without continuous investment.

2. Credibility and Trust: Websites that rank organically are often perceived as more trustworthy and credible by users. By appearing at the top of organic search results, businesses can establish authority and build trust with their target audience, leading to higher click-through rates and conversion rates.

3. Cost-effectiveness: Although SEO requires an initial investment of time and resources, its long-term cost-effectiveness outweighs the ongoing expenses associated with paid advertising campaigns. Once a website achieves high rankings, the cost per click (CPC) effectively becomes zero, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI) over time.

4. Enhanced User Experience: SEO emphasizes improving the overall user experience, which not only satisfies search engine algorithms but also enhances engagement and conversion rates. Factors such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, and quality content contribute to a positive user experience, ultimately boosting SEO performance.

Challenges of SEO:

1. Time-consuming Process: SEO is not a quick fix; it requires patience and continuous effort to see tangible results. It may take several months or even years to achieve top rankings, particularly in competitive industries or for highly sought-after keywords.

2. Algorithmic Changes: Search engines frequently update their algorithms to provide more relevant and valuable search results. While these updates aim to improve user experience, they can significantly impact a website's ranking and visibility, necessitating ongoing adjustments to SEO strategies.

3. Intense Competition: As businesses recognize the importance of SEO, competition for top rankings intensifies. Competing against established websites with robust SEO strategies can be challenging, especially for new or smaller businesses with limited resources.

Understanding Paid Advertising:

Paid advertising, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine marketing (SEM), involves placing ads on search engine results pages or other digital platforms and paying for clicks or impressions. Popular platforms for paid advertising include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

Advantages of Paid Advertising:

1. Immediate Results: Unlike SEO, which requires time to build momentum, paid advertising delivers immediate results. Businesses can launch ad campaigns quickly and start driving traffic to their website or landing pages almost instantly, making it an ideal option for time-sensitive promotions or product launches.

2. Targeted Reach: Paid advertising offers advanced targeting options, allowing businesses to reach highly specific audiences based on demographics, interests, behavior, and location. This precision targeting ensures that ads are displayed to individuals most likely to be interested in the products or services offered, maximizing the chances of conversion.

3. Measurable ROI: Paid advertising provides comprehensive metrics and analytics that enable advertisers to track the performance of their campaigns accurately. From click-through rates and conversion rates to cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS), businesses can measure the ROI of their advertising efforts and optimize campaigns accordingly for better results.

4. Flexible Budgeting: Paid advertising offers flexibility in budgeting, allowing businesses to set their desired spending limits and adjust them as needed. Whether it's a modest budget for a small business or a substantial investment for a large enterprise, paid advertising accommodates various budgetary constraints and offers scalable options for growth.

Challenges of Paid Advertising:

1. Cost Considerations: While paid advertising provides immediate results, it comes at a cost. Depending on factors such as competition, targeting criteria, and industry vertical, the cost per click (CPC) can vary significantly, potentially leading to high advertising expenses, especially for competitive keywords or niches.

2. Ad Fatigue: In a saturated digital landscape, consumers are bombarded with numerous ads across various platforms every day. As a result, there's a risk of ad fatigue, where audiences become desensitized to repetitive or irrelevant ads, leading to decreased engagement and conversion rates over time.

3. Dependence on Platforms: Paid advertising relies on third-party platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads, which control ad placements, targeting options, and algorithms. Changes to these platforms' policies or algorithms can impact ad performance and require adjustments to campaigns, posing a challenge for advertisers.

4. Limited Visibility: Unlike organic search results, paid ads are marked as advertisements and may not always receive the same level of trust or credibility from users. Some users may actively avoid clicking on ads, preferring organic search results, which can limit the visibility and effectiveness of paid advertising campaigns.

Choosing the Right Strategy:

While both SEO and Paid Advertising offer distinct advantages and challenges, the ideal approach for any business depends on various factors such as goals, budget, timeline, and target audience. In many cases, a combination of both strategies, known as a holistic digital marketing approach, can yield the best results.

Conclusion:

In the battle for online visibility, SEO and Paid Advertising each have their strengths and weaknesses. SEO emphasizes long-term sustainability, credibility, and cost-effectiveness, while Paid Advertising offers immediate results, targeted reach, and measurable ROI. By understanding the intricacies of both strategies and aligning them with business objectives, marketers can maximize their online presence and drive meaningful results in today's competitive digital landscape.

How to Get Started with Local SEO

It's very difficult to compete online with your small business. It's really hard to beat the online monsters with better sites, greater reach and deeper pockets. You can locally promote your small business by creating your local stores on Amazon.com: locality.

1. Local Business Search on Mobile - Now a days people is searching local business through mobile. According to a ComScore study mobile search has been increased by 20% compared to a fall of 6% in desktop search. 
2. G+ Local Page Creation - You can start your local SEO by creating your G+ local business page.
3. Local Business Listing - List your small business on local directories.
4. Local Store Creation - Create your local stores and list your product locally.
5. Local Classified Ads - Local classified ads related to your offers, deals and discount will help to get business leads locally.

Source Link - http://www.business2community.com/seo/get-started-local-seo-0752312#!tEZqf

Use Google’s Data Highlighter to Improve SEO

What is Google Data Highlighter?

Data Highlighter is a webmaster tool launched by Google to highlight event-related data on your website. It helps to tag the data fields on your site with a mouse. Google display your data more attractively in SERP and in other products such as the Google Knowledge Graph.

Data Highlighter to Improve SEO

Many CMS based website cannot be changed structurally, so it’s hard to mark up the data on a website that makes the most of Google’s new way of working. If you can not edit your site source to mark up structured data, you can use the Data Highlighter tool in Google Webmaster Tools to tell GWT where your important data is on the site.

Extra information displayed in search results next to your web page listing is known as "Rich Snippets".

Source: About Google Data Highlighter

Different Titles in Google SERPs

Google is not giving more weight-age to meta description as a ranking factor. But now a days Google starts treating page's title like meta description and showing different title in search engine result pages. Even Google is not showing title of their own pages properly in search engine result pages.

I have noticed that Google is not displaying the exact title tag in search engine result page for multiple websites. Google is ignoring title tag and showing their own. It is dramatically decreasing CTR of links. We all are not sure why this is happening. But I think Google is testing their idea for title.

Google Adword - keyword Matching Options

If you are using Google Ad word to run your PPC Campaign, you should know about keyword matching options. You can use this option to run an effective and successful PPC Campaign. With keyword matching options we can create cost effective ads for our PPC Campaign.

Google Ad word provides four keyword matching options determine which Google searches can trigger our ads to appear. These options can help you control who sees your ads.

Broad Match – Sport Shoe

It allows your ads for search terms that contain either or both words (Sport and Shoe) in any order.

                        

Phrase Match – “Sport Shoe”

It allows your ads for search terms that contain “Sport Shoe” in same order.

Exact Match – [Sport Shoe]

It allows your ads for search term that exactly match with keyword Sport Shoe.

Negative Match: -Used

If your keyword is Sport Shoe and you add the “-“ to “used” (-used), your ad will not appear for any search terms that contain the word “used”.

Microsoft's Bing Offers Airport Maps

On 29th September, 2011 Microsoft's Bing announced detailed airport maps as the newest addition to their popular venue maps for Bing Maps. The new Bing airport maps give you everything you need to navigate your way through your travels. Airport maps include information on parking garages, ticket counter location, terminals and gates, baggage claims, currency exchange and more! You’ll also see a sortable directory of airlines, cafes and restaurants.

Airport Maps - There are two ways to do this:

1. Just search for the airport (by name, city, or even code) on Bing Maps, and zoom in using map.

2. Search for your flight status on Bing (for example: CO 1665), and click on the map link besides the airport to see its map.

There are maps for 42 airports covering most of the medium and large hub airports in the United States.

Source: Microsoft's Bing Airport Maps

What is Google Panda?

Google Panda - Google introduce "Panda" to serve the quality result to fuel the usage. Technologies make it very easy to develop such a large website within a short-time. Many web sites being created everyday which cause the rapid increase in poorly developed websites. Now Google needs to check the web page having low quality content in order to deliver quality result to their users. That's why Google introduce Panda to removed spam results from their SERPs.

Panda is a ranking factor that has been added to the Google Ranking Algorithm. It is basically a "filter" that is design to identify the low quality page (articles, blog and simply copy and paste from other website) and effectively flags the site. Panda by Google will help in reducing spam.

How to Calculate Maximum CPA Bids?

Maximum CPA bid is based on current Maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bids and conversion rates.


How to calculate Conversion Rate?

Conversion Rate = Total Conversions/Total Views X 100

Example to calculate Maximum CPA Bid

Suppose you are running one ad group with two different keywords : "Burger" and "Veg Burger".

Keyword                                                   Burger                                 Veg Burger

Current Max CPC Bid                              $1.00                                  $1.40

Conversion Rate                                       10%                                     20%

No. of Conversion                                    100                                      50


To get a maximum CPA bid for "Burger"

Maximum CPA Bid = Max. CPC/Conversion Rate = $1.00/10% = $10.00


To get a maximum CPA bid for "Veg Burger"

Maximum CPA Bid = Max. CPC/Conversion Rate = $1.40/20% = $7.00

How do I set up goals and funnels?

In order for Google Analytics to calculate goal conversion metrics, you must create one or more goals. Before setting up a goal, please make sure you have the following requirements.

Requirements

* The name of the goal: Specify a name that you will recognize when viewing the goals within each set of your reports. Examples of names you might use include "email sign-up"or "article ABC download."
* The defined funnel: You may specify up to ten pages in a defined funnel. Although funnels are optional, defining one can help you map where visitors drop off during the path to completing a goal.
* The value of the goal: Google Analytics uses an assigned goal value to calculate ROI, Average Score, and other metrics. A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your "Contact Me" goal. In contrast, if only 1% of mailing list signups result in a sale, you might only assign $5 to your "email sign-up" goal.

Resource Link : Google Analytic Help

301 Redirect - non-www to www

Apache Server

301 Permanent Redirect - non-www to www (Only for Websites Hosted on Apache Server)

1. Install "Mod_Rewrite" on a server.

2. create a .htaccess file, open notepad, name and save
the file as htaccess.txt (System will not support .htaccess extension)

3. If you already have a .htaccess file on your server, download it to your desktop for editing.

4. Place this code in your htaccess.txt file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^dipseducation.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.dipseducation.com/$1 [R=301,L]

5. Save the htaccess.txt file.

6. Upload this file to the root folder of your server.

7. After uploading "htaccess.txt file" in your root folder rename this file as ".htaccess" on a server.

8. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you've changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.

Window Server

301 Permanent Redirect - non-www to www (Only for Websites Hosted on Window Server)

1. Install "ISAPI_Rewrite" on a server.

2. create a httpd.ini file, open notepad, name and save
the file as httpd.ini.

3. If you already have a httpd.ini file on your server,
download it to your desktop for editing.

4. Place this code in your httpd.ini file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond Host: ^dipseducation\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http\://www\.dipseducation\.com$1 [I,RP]

5. Save the httpd.ini file.

6. Upload this file to the root folder of your server.

7. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you've changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.

What is Code to Text Ratio?

Code to Text Ratio

The Code to Text Ratio calculates the percentage of actual text in a web page. Content ratio tool extracts the text from paragraphs and the anchor text from HTML code and calculates the Code to Text Ratio based on this information.

Why Code to Text Ratio Important for SEO?

Code to text ratio is used by search engines to check the relevancy of a web page. Higher Code to Text Ratio is good for ranking purpose.

An Example to calculate code to text ratio percentage of a web page is given below:

Web Page Size :
17481 Bytes = 17 KB

Code Size :
13692 Bytes = 13 KB

Text Size :
3789 Bytes = 4 KB

Code to Text Ratio = Text Size/Web Page Size*100

Code to Text Ratio = 3789/17481*100 = 21.67%

What is canonical error?

What is Canonical Error?

When your home page opens with both "http://www.site.com" and "http://site.com" is known as canonical error. Sometime Canonical URL (best URL version) is also referred as "Preferred Domain".

Canonicalization (Methods to set this problem)

1. Set your preferred domain (using webmaster tool)

2. Specify the canonical link for each version of the page
For Example:
link rel="canonical" href="http://www.canonical.com"
Add this extra information to the section of non-canonical URLs.

3. Indicate your canonical (preferred) URLs by including them in a Sitemap

4. Indicate how you would like Google to handle dynamic parameters. (by using Parameter Handling)

Source: Google Webmaster Central

How to get top 10 position in SERPs?

1.    If you don't want too much competition from other SEOs, choose your keywords precisely. For example, Instead of keyowrd Loan choose keywords like Bank Loan, Equity Loan, Student Loan, Home Loan etc.

Order of keyword also matter for search engines. Search engine treats Loan Equity, and Equity Loan as different keywords.

2.    Best seo practice is to get at least one of your primary keywords in domain or sub domain name of your website. You can use hyphens (-) to separate multiple keywords. For example: seo-service, seo-guidelines, free-seo each cover two keyords.

3.    Get your second or third keywords in your directory name and filename. For example http://www.hiddentricks.com/seo/free-tips.html is best for keyword "free seo tips" , "seo hidden tricks" or "free seo tricks"

4.    Keep your webpage free from any syntax error, declare document type at the beginning and validate your HTML and CSS because search engine don't like pages with too many errors.

5.    Give a short Title in of your page in 3-9 words (60-80 characters) maximum in length containing your primary keyword. Remember it will be displayed in search results so choose wisely.

6.    Try to include your most important keyword phrases in heading tags on your page if you can but keep in mind it should not be exactly same as title of your page. You can use (H1 H2 H3) tag for specifying anything important. To reduce size of heading use CSS.

7.    Specify Meta keywords in heading of document. Limit it to 15 to 20 words. Although not all the search engines give importance but there is no harm doing it. Search engine like Yahoo still give it importance.

8.    Write Your Meta Description tag attractive containing keywords because it will appear on the search engine result pages.

9.    Use text for navigation menu instead of using images or Java scripts.

10.    Try to include your most important keyword in hyperlinked text and text and text that immediately precedes or follows the hyperlink.
Do not use same keyword always use synonyms at few places. Jusk like instead of seo, I have use search engine optimization at many places on this page.

11.    If you are using images then use "alt" attribute to describe your image with proper keyword.

12.    One of the best webmaster guideline is to submit sitemap of your website to make sure all pages of your website are indexed by search engine crawlers.

13.    Keep size of your webpages less than 50KB so it is downloaded fast and visitors don't have to wait for long. For good SEO site page size ideal should be 15KB.

14.    Try to avoid your content in Flash, frame, images, java script because crawler find it very difficult and it is against seo tips and guidelines.

15.    Don't use dynamic url because it don?t contain keywords so its not search engine friendly. If you are using any script which shows dynamic pages then make sure at least it should include one keyword.

16.    Don't try to spam and never use methods like cloaking, keyword spamming or doorway pages. Many seo advices to have multiple domain name and link each other but according to our SEO tips and guidelines search engine can penalize you for this. Instead of that try to add more quality content to your existing website.

17.    Submit your website only once to Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and other search engines and open directory. Don't use any script or website for automatic submission.

18.    If your website contents changes very often then provide visitor with Newsletter and RSS feed.

19.    Write articles on website related to yours having higher page ranking and leave your websites link.

20.    Get link from other sites related to yours, search engine consider it as vote in your favour.

Source Link: Hiddentricks

Cookie Vs Cache

Cookie

A cookie is a piece of information that a web site(web server) puts on your hard disk while surfing a web site through browser so, that it can remember something about the user & user's log in details for future use.

Cache

Copies of web pages stored locally on an Internet user's hard drive or within a search engine's database. When you return to a page you have recently visited, the browser can get it from cache rather than the original server location.

Robots.txt Vs Robots Meta Tag

 Robots.txt

While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site, or the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results.

In order to use a robots.txt file, you'll need to have access to the root of your domain (if you're not sure, check with your web hoster). If you don't have access to the root of a domain, you can restrict access using the robots meta tag.

Robots Meta Tag

To entirely prevent a page's contents from being listed in the Google web index even if other sites link to it, use a noindex meta tag. As long as Googlebot fetches the page, it will see the noindex meta tag and prevent that page from showing up in the web index.

When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. Other search engines, however, may interpret this directive differently. As a result, a link to the page can still appear in their search results.

Note that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there's a small chance that Googlebot won't see and respect the noindex meta tag. If your page is still appearing in results, it's probably because we haven't crawled your site since you added the tag. (Also, if you've used your robots.txt file to block this page, we won't be able to see the tag either.)

If the content is currently in our index, we will remove it after the next time we crawl it. To expedite removal, use the URL removal request tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

Source Link: Google Webmaster Central

Viral Marketing

What is Viral Marketing?

An effective way of advertising or producing brand exposure through social networks. This technique spreads promotional message throughout the network rapidly by "word of mouth" or by Internet resources like e-mail, blogs or other services.

Viral Marketing Techniques

• Making Community.
• Affiliate Program.
• Offer Free Stuff (Like Customize Screen Saver, E-Books, Tools).
  
• Posting Video Clips.
• Newsletters.
• Email Campaign.
• Article Distribution.
• Press Release.
  
• Sharing Information ( Like Images, PDF, PPT).
• Signature Link.
  

These are just only some viral marketing ideas that i hope will help.

URL Rewriting

Introduction 

URL rewriting can be one of the best and quickest ways to improve the usability and search friendliness of your site. It can also be the source of near-unending misery and suffering. Definitely worth playing carefully with it - lots of testing is recommended. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that. There are several other guides on the web already, that may suit your needs better than this one.

• Apache URL Rewriting Guide - The best guide around

Before reading on, you may find it helpful to have the mod_rewrite cheat sheet and/or the regular expressions cheat sheet handy. A basic grasp of the concept of regular expressions would also be very helpful.

What is "URL Rewriting"?

Most dynamic sites include variables in their URLs that tell the site what information to show the user. Typically, this gives URLs like the following, telling the relevant script on a site to load product number 7.

http://www.pets.com/show_a_product.php?product_id=7

 

The problems with this kind of URL structure are that the URL is not at all memorable. It's difficult to read out over the phone (you'd be surprised how many people pass URLs this way). Search engines and users alike get no useful information about the content of a page from that URL. You can't tell from that URL that that page allows you to buy a Norwegian Blue Parrot (lovely plumage). It's a fairly standard URL - the sort you'd get by default from most CMSes. Compare that to this URL:

http://www.pets.com/products/7/

Clearly a much cleaner and shorter URL. It's much easier to remember, and vastly easier to read out. That said, it doesn't exactly tell anyone what it refers to. But we can do more:

http://www.pets.com/parrots/norwegian-blue/

Now we're getting somewhere. You can tell from the URL, even when it's taken out of context, what you're likely to find on that page. Search engines can split that URL into words (hyphens in URLs are treated as spaces by search engines, whereas underscores are not), and they can use that information to better determine the content of the page. It's an easy URL to remember and to pass to another person.

Unfortunately, the last URL cannot be easily understood by a server without some work on our part. When a request is made for that URL, the server needs to work out how to process that URL so that it knows what to send back to the user. URL rewriting is the technique used to "translate" a URL like the last one into something the server can understand.

Platforms and Tools

Depending on the software your server is running, you may already have access to URL rewriting modules. If not, most hosts will enable or install the relevant modules for you if you ask them very nicely.

Apache is the easiest system to get URL rewriting running on. It usually comes with its own built-in URL rewriting module, mod_rewrite, enabled, and working with mod_rewrite is as simple as uploading correctly formatted and named text files.

IIS, Microsoft's server software, doesn't include URL rewriting capability as standard, but there are add-ons out there that can provide this functionality. ISAPI_Rewrite is the one I recommend working with, as I've so far found it to be the closest to mod_rewrite's functionality. Instructions for installing and configuring ISAPI_Rewrite can be found at the end of this article.

The code that follows is based on URL rewriting using mod_rewrite.

Basic URL Rewriting

To begin with, let's consider a simple example. We have a website, and we have a single PHP script that serves a single page. Its URL is:

http://www.pets.com/pet_care_info_07_07_2008.php

 

We want to clean up the URL, and our ideal URL would be:

http://www.pets.com/pet-care/

 

In order for this to work, we need to tell the server to internally redirect all requests for the URL "pet-care" to "pet_care_info_07_07_2008.php". We want this to happen internally, because we don't want the URL in the browser's address bar to change.

To accomplish this, we need to first create a text document called ".htaccess" to contain our rules. It must be named exactly that (not ".htaccess.txt" or "rules.htaccess"). This would be placed in the root directory of the server (the same folder as "pet_care_info_07_07_2008.php" in our example). There may already be an .htaccess file there, in which case we should edit that rather than overwrite it.

The .htaccess file is a configuration file for the server. If there are errors in the file, the server will display an error message (usually with an error code of "500"). If you are transferring the file to the server using FTP, you must make sure it is transferred using the ASCII mode, rather than BINARY. We use this file to perform 2 simple tasks in this instance - first, to tell Apache to turn on the rewrite engine, and second, to tell apache what rewriting rule we want it to use. We need to add the following to the file:

RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine RewriteRule ^pet-care/?$ pet_care_info_01_02_2003.php [NC,L] # Handle requests for "pet-care"

A couple of quick items to note - everything following a hash symbol in an .htaccess file is ignored as a comment, and I'd recommend you use comments liberally; and the "RewriteEngine" line should only be used once per .htaccess file (please note that I've not included this line from here onwards in code example).

The "RewriteRule" line is where the magic happens. The line can be broken down into 5 parts:

• RewriteRule - Tells Apache that this like refers to a single RewriteRule.
• ^/pet-care/?$ - The "pattern". The server will check the URL of every request to the site to see if this pattern matches. If it does, then Apache will swap the URL of the request for the "substitution" section that follows.
• pet_care_info_01_02_2003.php - The "substitution". If the pattern above matches the request, Apache uses this URL instead of the requested URL.
• [NC,L] - "Flags", that tell Apache how to apply the rule. In this case, we're using two flags. "NC", tells Apache that this rule should be case-insensitive, and "L" tells Apache not to process any more rules if this one is used.
• # Handle requests for "pet-care" - Comment explaining what the rule does (optional but recommended)

The rule above is a simple method for rewriting a single URL, and is the basis for almost all URL rewriting rules.

Source Link: URL Rewriting