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Search Engines 101 Paid vs. Natural Search

by Terry_Stanfield

Whenever folks want to store this getting involved in Internet
marketing the first thing that comes to their mind is what the
difference between natural search and paid search is. Both
strategies have their pros and cons but can be very effective as
part of a marketing strategy. The following article is a brief
description of both natural and paid search strategies.

Paid search is when your ad shows up at the very top of a Google
search or down the right hand side of the results page. These are
called �sponsored ads�. You pay for those positions. When every
you click on one of those ads the owner of the ad pays Google.
This is also called �pay-per-click�. The amount you pay is
determined by several factors including what you are willing to
pay every time someone clicks on your ad.

Natural Search is when you type in a �keyword" and a link and a
description shows up on left hand side of the search result page.
The only way to get on the first page is to have very relevant
content on your web site and links to your site from other
relevant sites. This is a long process for people in it for the
long haul. There are a lot of companies that claim to be able to
get you on the first page of Google. That may be true if the
�search term� is very specific and no one else would ever search
for it but you or they are using a �black hat� method that could
get you site banned from the search engine.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN are really just data
bases. When you do a Google Search you are not searching the
�world wide web� you are searching Google�s data base. There are
two ways to get in to these databases. One is to submit your site
to the different search engines. In about 6 to 9 weeks the search
engine will index your site. They have software that comes to
your site and index every page and adds it to the database. They
come into your main web URL and follow the links to all the pages
of your site. They capture key elements from the code on your
page to the content. These are then stored in the data base. When
someone puts a keyword in the search box the �algorithms�
determine the best page or links to the best pages for your
search.

The other way to get added to the search engines data base is to
have the search engine software find you through a link to your
site from another web site back to yours. The software, called
�spiders� will periodically comeback and re crawl your site to
see if you have updated it.

One important thing to know is that each page on your site is
indexed individually and each page stands on its own. The ranking
are based upon the combination of correct meta tags, relevant
content to the keyword they are trying to get rankings for and
link popularity. Mostly one way links back to their site from
relevant sites.

As long as the search engine can index the site, clearly read
the meta tags and content, the better. The big issues come when a
site is built in flash with very little content (search engines
cannot read or index "flash" sites. Also, if the bulk of the
relevant content is in PDF format this is bad because the search
engines cannot read PDF. If the search engines cannot index the
relevant text there will be no rankings.

You all ready know this but "sites" are not ranked, individual
pages are ranked for specific terms found in the content of that
page as well as link popularity, (relevant links pointing back to
that specific page) for the term that you are trying to get
ranked on. This is why each page has to be giving very specific
attention.

Bottom line: Paid search means you pay for your position. The
benefit is if you have the $$ you will get instant traffic. Stop
paying and the traffic goes away. Natural search is free traffic
but it is built over time. The advantage is that if done right,
it can provide traffic for a long time.

Search traffic (paid or natural) is the BEST traffic to have
because you are being found by folks who are specifically looking
for what you have. It does not get any better than that.

Terry Stanfield is a SEM consultant with over 15 years of sales
and marketing experience. His company, Clickadvantage, manages
PPC and SEO efforts for his lead generation and ecommerce
clients. For more information <a
href="http://www.clickadvant.com/se101.htm"
title="http://www.clickadvant.com/se101.htm"
target="_blank">http://www.clickadvant.com/se101.htm</a>

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