subject: How To Rank Higher In The Serp's [print this page] When it comes to online marketing there are many channels available to aid your website generate traffic. Some methods work better than others depending on the nature of your industry and what exactly you are offering on your website.
The most popular way for consumers to search for products or information on the internet would have to be by going through a search engine.
Even when it comes to search engines there are multiple channels that can be used: SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay Per Click). SEO concerns the organic search results that appear due to their merit and relevancy to the end users original search query, PPC on the other hand appears in general to the right of the search results and these websites appear because they have paid for the privilege of appearing on the first page of search results whenever an end user type's in a specific set of words related to a particular industry.
It is well known however that SEO or natural search results are the most clicked links due to their relevancy and the fact that they haven't had to pay for the privilege of appearing near the top of the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page). Compared to SEO, PPC is relatively easy. All that is required is to analyse which keywords are linked to your website, enter these keywords into a search engine and pay either a fixed or variable fee to appear in the sponsored links that are displayed on the results page.
With SEO it is a totally different story that requires a lot of on-page and off-page work to achieve properly. The two main areas to SEO are keyword optimisation and backlinks. In order for your website to rank well in search engines it is essential that keywords related to the industry or nature of your website are displayed in the correct places. This involves making sure certain keywords are repeated in the content of your pages, in your meta tags and meta descriptions as this will aid any search engine spiders to categorise your website and determine how relevant it is to end users search queries.
Without a full keyword analysis of which keywords end users enter into a search engine then you will not be able to optimise your website effectively to gain as much traffic as possible over your competition.
The second part to SEO is off page. This requires your website gaining enough backlinks from notable sites to push your site up higher in the SERP's. Backlinks are like gold dust to websites where the more backlinks there are pointing to your site the more chance there is that Google or other search engines see's your site as being reputable and of reference to that particular market.
There are numerous ways of obtaining backlinks which can involve the following: Posting articles online through an article syndication website, creating blogs, create interesting content that can be used as link bait and exchanging links with other websites. It is not recommended to buy links as generally the backlinks you will acquire will come from link farms which have very little value and Google or other search engines may even penalise you for this.
