Search Engine Advertising & Sponsored Listings

Extensive exposure can be gained almost immediately through paid advertising in the search engines. Sponsored listings in the search engines, for many industries, are the most cost effective form of advertising available today. This listing can be highly targeted to specific search terms, geographic areas, and times of day, so that your ads are only shown to your target market. These ads are billed on a pay-per-click model, meaning that you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. If someone views your ad without clicking, it’s free advertising. The average cost per click across all industries is in the neighborhood of $1.25. However in many industries where there are fewer competitors the cost per click can be as low as $0.05. The greatest benefit to search engine advertising is the detailed tracking and analysis that can be done. You can tell exactly what it costs to get a visitor to your website, whether they filled out a contact form or viewed a phone number, what pages they visited, etc. to determine if it’s a cost effective form of advertising. Further, by implementing other web technologies you can display a different phone number to the people that come through your paid ads to be able to track the number of phone calls generated as well. The Helix Group can set-up, monitor, analyze and optimize search engine advertising campaigns to insure the greatest number of relevant clicks for your investment dollar.

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On Page Optimization for Search Engines

On Page Optimization involves rewriting, restructuring, and reformatting website pages to appear more relevant to search engines for a particular topic. When done correctly, this also makes your web site more effective and easier to use for your clients. The changes made in on page optimization are often subtle, and often no one but the original author or designer of the page would know that changes were made, however they can have a significant impact. On Page Optimization is crucial to obtaining relevant search placement. The first step in On Page Optimization is research. An initial list of keywords and phrases to target needs to be determined. Data should be collected on the search volume for those phrases and other related terms. The data is then analyzed to determine which keywords and phrases should be given priority in the optimization. The next step is the optimization of the website itself. The page and navigation structure should be analyzed to determine how a search engine would travel through the site and if the site needs to be restructured. If it is determined that a website needs to be restructured it should be done in a way that preserves the look and feel as much as possible and/or improves usability. The next step is rewriting the textual content in the website. The search engines look at keyword density (how often a word appears), placement (where on the page the words appear), color, size, contrast, context and use. We may modify any or all of these things to achieve optimal relevancy. It should be noted that no change should ever be done at the expense of clarity of message, purpose of the page, usability or readability. Finally a number of things are done to a website to facilitate their access by the search engines. For example XML sitemaps are added so the search engines can easily access every page on the website. Robots.txt files are added to help direct search engines to areas that are important to them and keep them out of areas not meant to be searched.

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Social Marketing & Search Optimization - Together at Last

Beyond what is on the pages of your website, the other major factor that search engines weigh heavily when determining a website’s ranking is who is linking to you; in other words, what websites are linked to your website? It helpful to look at it like a political endorsement, an endorsement from a like-minded, well known and respected politician will give your campaign a much larger boost then an endorsement from John Q. Public. Likewise a link from a popular, high traffic website with content relevant to yours will give a strong boost to your website rankings. The search engines look at how many links are coming to your website, what websites they are from, what the pages that the links are on say, and most importantly, what the link text itself says.

Link building can be done in a number of different ways. The most common is through listings in various online directories. While this worked in the past, it’s no longer a significant benefit to your website’s ranking unless the directory is highly popular and specifically relevant to your industry. Today the best ways to build strong relevant links to your website that boost your search engine rankings are also the best ways to boost traffic and gain exposure for your business online outside of the search engines. Most commonly called social marketing or viral marketing, it involves interacting with online communities in your target markets and within your own industry. The idea is to accomplish two things, first by interacting with your target market gaining direct exposure to your potential clients increasing name recognition and awareness of your service offering. Second, in all of your interactions you also create links, which are posted on those interactive website and which in turn boost your search engine rankings through a highly relevant link. Over time, if done well and regularly, it can start to spiral and your market will start talking about you and linking to you.

Highly relevant links can also be built through online press releases, blog posts, links from your clients and suppliers, etc.

The Helix Group can develop a strategy and implement a link building campaign that boosts both your exposure to your market and your search engine rankings.

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