subject: Getting Your Site At The Head Of The Search Engines Display Is Essential To Your Business [print this page] It could be right that the speed by which the UK is pulling out of recession is surprising, but there are a few including national treasure Ken Clarke who are concerned that it is still possible that we could yet take a slowdown and have a double dip recession. I for 1 am not among them, but business large and small must still pay attention to outgoings, especially the hidden ones.
1 such hidden cost can be how you place the firm's website so that it can be found. The world wide web is substantially bigger now than when I began using it in 1995 when a good, unique or innovative site could attract a gigantic following (for the time) by word of mouth ie passing links to mates who, with not a massive variety to see would have a look out of sheer curiosity. Nowadays we call that spam but then, and remember almost no real trade was transacted over the web as it was tricky for currency to paid, folks would go and have a glance. These days it is not so simple to get people to go and site owners effectively have 2 choices.
The first of these is an Ad-word campaign. By doing this, a number of keywords that help to identify the business and what it has to say and retail are identified. A dedicated company then sorts out placement with the engines so that when the user searches using one of those keywords, a sponsored link is shown at the top of the results page. Now this is good because you know that potential customers are going to see a link to your site displayed prominently and there's a good chance the user will follow it. When they follow the link, you are charged a fee every time.
This charge is normally around 50p, and you can control your daily, weekly or monthly outlay so that your costs don't go through the roof if users only click the link, nurdle around the site and then leave. But you will still pay if they spend currency or not. And if the allowance is swallowed up on disinterested visitors, someone who wants to part with money may not get the link at all. This is very much a hidden cost.
There is a similar plan, search engine optimisation means that your website can be targeted towards being made friendly and easy for the search engines to show the link to your page as high up the results tables as possible. If you find an affordable SEO company and use them, they will examine your website and recommend ways to make it attractive to the search engines. They will identify keywords that you might not currently have or have thought of and find how they need to be placed around the pages of your website.
What makes search engine optimisation a useful option is that payment is generally by results, i.e. you pay only when your site is on the first page of search results and you can make certain you have an affordable SEO company by agreeing the number of keywords you pay for every month. If you are satisfied, then you can have more which may also have relevance to your site.
This search engine optimisation is by way of being a bit of a secret art, not tricky but quite specialised and can occasionally be done at the outset by a software consultancy outfit if they design your site for you, but what a software consultancy company can't do is give the rolling support that makes certain that your site continues to be appropriate to the search engines by demonstrating that the site is still in use and is worthy of it's place on the results page.
And once your keywords are in the 'organic' results, you can save more money by halting your ad-words promotions and expunge a hidden cost on your expenditure. Score!
