Million Dollar Question: PPC v/s SEO – Which is better?

PPC is the acronym for “Pay Per Click”. It is type of search engine marketing tool which has gained immense popularity recently. This has given rise to a debate - Which is a better option, SEO or PPC? Which one of them will yield better search results? Some of the experts of the web suggest that a combination of both the techniques should be used to get good results. The webmasters who are new to online marketing techniques suffer from a lot of confusion. A lot of questions go on in their mind and most of them are still unanswered. To answers the questions correctly, we should take a look at the pros and cons of both of the techniques.

The advantages and disadvantages of Search Engine Optimization are:
The most attractive thing about SEO is that you don't have to pay a single penny from your pocket in order to get listed in search result pages. The search engine does not charge you anything when you carry out SEO. To improve the quality of your website and get it optimized you have to simply follow some techniques, which can be done in many ways. The most important thing is to use good quality and informative content in the web pages of your website. If user comes on your website and spends time to read the genuine information, the value of your webpage increases. And once Google thinks that this web page is providing relevant information with some keyword, your website will be ranked high. The search engine spiders will also find it easy to scan through the website. The results will last for a very long period. The website will appear at the top of search engine results for a longer amount of time in the future.

Now talking about the negative side of SEO, the SEO techniques are very time consuming. There are many search engines that use a set of filters. These filters take such parameters like age of the website and age of the domain into consideration while carrying out the optimization process. So you have to wait patiently before you start seeing the actual results.

Pros and cons of PPC:

PPC is a new technique that is being adopted by most of the webmasters involved in online marketing if they want to get fast results. PPC is a bidding system, where you have to bid against other websites which are of similar type and are running PPC campaign. Like this you can get to the top of search page results that shows paid listings. For example you have a website for “e-books”. You have to place your bid for the keyword “e-book” so that your website appears on the top of the search result whenever someone searches using that particular keyword. Your relative position on the page will be decided depending on the amount you are willing to pay with respect to your fellow bidders. One thing you should keep in mind is that PPC campaigns are very tough to maintain.

So it is wise to carry out PPC for a very short time period and continue with SEO at the back end. Adopting both the strategies will help you get good results in the long run.

Why keyword To Page Relevancy Is Important

If you would want to be like the blooming populations who are making money through a snap on their keyboards, then there are some fundamental things you need to know prior to doing it. Being a blogger or a writer for website contents, then you have to be familiar with some things and take note about certain ideas. It is easy to write and tap the spaces on your keyboard if you have great ideas, but no matter how amazing your idea is, that would still be in no use if nobody is going to read it. To help you in succeeding with your goal to speak your mind and impart your knowledge, you need to be acquainted with the fact that one of the most important stuffs that your post must be equipped of is the keyword.

Well, I have already come up with answers to some basic questions before you could possibly put them to words. But if in this instance, you feel like there’s no need for you to know a lot, and then you may stop scrolling. However, if you are willing to be a more effective blogger or web writer, then you certainly need to keep scrolling to have knowledge about the pre-requisites in achieving your aims.

What are Keywords?

If you would want to have a lot of visitors on your page, then you must come up with the best keyword possible which targets the most likely researched topic on the web. This shall be submitted on the Google webmaster tools to enable the search engines to absorb it and show it to the web visitors.

How to optimize for keywords?

People who are already experienced in this kind of activity have already mastered what to do or what to use as a keyword for their posts. However, most of them are still having a difficult time in coming up with the best, since they have millions and millions of competitors. In this case, numbers of people are even making researches and creating surveys to be able to know

which one really works. Sometimes, we think that we may look and sound brilliant when we use words which are unique, and which are not cliché. We think that deeper words mean better post, but that is just not the case. With website-related posts and blogs, often times, less is actually more. Less complicated words would mean more readers especially if you are trying to impart knowledge and facts. You always have to consider many factors such as the individuals from other country who may read your posts.

What is “relevancy of keywords”?

Keyword relevancy is the parallelism of your keywords with regards to the content of your post. You need to stay on track on what you really want to convey. The keywords that you may use must define the most significant message of your post. However, you still need to make a blissful flow of your post through the optimal keyword density in which you should limit the usage of the word that you are about to use. Some say it should only be 2% to 5% of the post because anything more than that will be considered a spam.

What are the benefits of having keyword relevancy?
Nirvana stage of optimization is:
Ideal keywords, ideal ad copy (if you wish to have contextual ads), landing page with relevant content.If this state is achieved, best ROI (Return on Investment) is guaranteed.

Every marketer (SEO, SEM, Social, Display) tries to reach the best proxmity to relvancy and all the best online marketing practices are designed around the same idea.

Why there is a growing need of SEO consultants in India?

This is the period of globalization. Internet technologies and tools are developing very quickly. The term internet marketing is used in advertising the products on the internet. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an excellent tool that is used for internet marketing. Advertising the products by submitting articles is now a great tool for internet marketing.

With the internet marketing tools, business can be increased to huge heights. There are thousands of websites available on the web for you to attract customers for your brand. This can happen only if the look and feel of the website is good.

The controlling tool for internet marketing is SEO. India is using SEO as a tool for internet marketing of the products. Internet is the worldwide platform for both the sellers and the buyers. It also acts a midway for different scenarios of online communities.
Online buyers search for particular keywords. These keywords come up on the very first page of the search engine. It means both the online buyers and the online sellers are using platform of search engine to advertise their products and services.

Your websites can achieve high ranking in Google due to the efforts made by skilful professionals of internet marketing services. The next thing is that the website should be technically good. The best way to develop business is by submitting articles, blogs, press releases and social media forums.

Grouping of keywords is very important as it basically depends on the search done by the online users. It is the keyword that determines the ranking of the websites. SEO programs and keywords are the tools used by SEO in internet marketing.

As the websites traffic is increasing, the web sales and the profits are also increasing. This is where the SEO consultants are playing a major role in determining the internet economy. ‘Search’ is the most effective work out for marketing across the world. The global economies are working together through search as the secret to find a seller or the buyer is today the search engine.

All the sellers and the buyers have websites and they are using their websites to advertise their products. For your website to be SEO friendly and to appear on the first page a lot of consultancy is needed and SEO consultants come into place.

The advantages of hiring SEO consultant is that they know how and when to use the internet tools to attract the customers. With this, you can even control the search engines for your key terms. It can be done faster and the small business SEO is cheap when compared to the conventional advertising. Having a good SEO consultant helps you to be on the top of Google and Yahoo.

These consultants know all the techniques on how increase your outcome by providing SEO outsourcing in a professional way.

PPC and SEO - In-house or Outsource?

Over the time, Outsourcing Online Marketing activities (SEO, SEM, Social) has been a constant dilemma in the mind of the top leadership. On one side its the content ownership and secrecy of  data while on the other hand, its cost and resources management.

Particularly SEO ( the organic arm of traffic marketing) is largely popular and gives away a bigger chunk going to freelancers, while SEM ( Paid search marketing if we can refer) has been a agency outsourcing model if the internal team is not comfortable with resources and time.

   

Be it any small business owner in a B2B or a B2C market, all of them have worked hard to decide whether the internet marketing should be outsourced or should the in-house employees be hired to do the work.

SEO services are the services that are required to run business successfully. Today, there is need for every business to exist online. Having the business online is as important as having it physically. SEO has many practices that allow Google to find and index your web pages. SEO makes the work of Internet advertisers and online business holders easy and helps to build a good reputation; promoting their business predictions. Few of the practices used by the SEO consultants are link building, social media, and on-page and off-page optimization. These practices help to improve the chances of the search engines finding their web pages. 

The main idea of SEO is to increase the traffic to the websites. This can be accomplished by increasing the page rank of the web pages through SEO practices. The web page with a high page rank means that the web users are using the web site quite often and increases the traffic of that particular web site. Having attractive designs and good content on your website will make sure that the user logged in will not exit your website. Technical professionals and content writers also play a major role and are a part of SEO team. The main responsibility of the technical professionals is to design a website such that the web users will not have any problems when browsing your website. Content writers are those who write good quality content and make the users understand what the website does for their customers.  SEO outsourcing has become quite common these days and they are teams that are dedicated to improve your business online. 

If you just want to get the name and if your plan is clear within the next 2 years, then it would be good if you look for SEO outsourcing.  A good SEO company will mainly focus on SEO, email marketing, link building and PPC management. Based on the budget, you can decide which service suits you the best. 

When you hire in-house employees, you need to pay for training and also to retain them. At the time of induction, people need to be identified as per the specialized skills. For example Pay Per Click (PPC) Consultants. Even after spending a huge amount of money on the employees training, they are going to leave you and the company, unless you agree to pay them the best.

How to Measure PPC (Pay Per Click) Performance?

 The main advantage of Online Marketing over Offline or Traditional is the 'measurability' of investment and the Return on Investment (ROI). SEO (organic search) and SEM (Paid Search) are two vital pillars of Internet Marketing. Its been a constant debate which of these two is better - SEO or SEM? There is no direct answers as SEM is pinpoint advertising based on interest while SEO is all about Broad guidelines for a constantly improving performance. Whether the quality of SEO is better than SEM, depends on your SEO or SEM (also known as PPC, although not limited to) consultant.    
                                             
All of us know that, for a successful PPC (pay per click) campaign one should get a high return on investment.
A PPC campaign is quite costly and it does burn a pretty little hole in your pocket the first time. So, it's essential that you get it right in one go. The reason we spend big bucks on this campaign is that PPC is one of the most useful online marketing strategies available. There are several ways in which the PPC performance can be gauged. These are listed here. First up, the CTR (click through rate). It is based on the ratio between number of impressions and ads clicked. This gives an idea of how many are actually clicking the ads. 


Next up, CPV (cost per conversion). It tells us the average cost per conversion of each ad, and we can decide on our own which ad was successful and which was not. The 'bounce rate' and 'time on site' features tell us whether the ads are relevant to our website landing page and how interesting the site was, respectively. One of the best indicators, though, is the actual loss incurred in the PPC budget. The more the loss, the worse the
campaign. Our main aim with the campaign should be to incur no loss at all.

Learn Google Adwords - Learn How to Use the Dimensions Tab in Enhancing the PPC Campaigns

One of the least utilized and highly useful option for Google Adwords Campaign Optimization is the Dimensions Tab.

In broader definition, search engine marketing is a way of increasing traffic using Adwords, paid advertisements, paid inclusions as well as contextual advertising. Search engine optimization (SEO) on the other hand optimizes the content of a website so that it will gain a good ranking in search engines.However, depending on the context of the website, SEM can be used in marketing the website which includes SEO or it may just focus on paid search results. The popular search engine marketing vendors are Yahoo Search Marketing, Google Adwords as well as Microsoft adCenter.

When used in some context especially in marketing communities and commercial advertising, the phrase search engine marketing is used exclusively in a Pay per Click advertising. If you are into paid search engines in Google Adwords, use the Dimensions tab so that you won’t miss out on lots of stuff that will be useful to you. This is an important element of Adwords UI. This will permit you to have a god view of the data of a specific campaign or an entire account. When you used the Dimensions tab,it lessens wasteful expenditures, target the desired customers and enhance the conversions.

The Dimensions tab can be found in the right side of the tab lists in the adWords UI. If you are having difficulty in locating it, just click the down arrow located at the end of the row so that the menu with available tabs will show up. You can see here the types of applicable tabs in the adWords UI. It will show you the Conversions, Time, Reach and other options. You will find stuffs here that are relevant to your campaign. You can use any of the features in your ads like the track able phone numbers, then the call details option will work for you. However, if you are only using the search network, you won’t have the advantage of automatic placements but you certainly can make use of whatever you have.

The “search terms” option in the Dimensions tab will allow you to see the queries generating your ads and also remove any unnecessary terms. This is very useful if your campaign is using several general keywords. This means that the Dimensions tab is useful in optimizing your campaign. With this on hand, you can play around and look for the best possible ways to improve your campaigns. You can always use the data, Customize columns and other advance options that you can use in several ways.

Top SEO SEM (Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing) Groups Online

In order to start learning about various online learning and business activities and buzz, among several sources such as books, articles etc. one major and developing source is group activities.
Asking general or specific questions, surveys and opinions is a characteristic property of an active community/ group.

Specifically for 'seo, internet marketing' as there are very less takers on printed books as compared to the online audience, groups play a vital role in learning online.
Whether you are a new learner, ethusiasts, just surfing and found interesting person, or a serious researcher, practicing professional or consultant, everyone needs the latest knowledge, news and happenings online in what interests him/her.

Many internet aware business leaders too are part of various internet marketing communities and group sharing knowledge online.

The perfect place for Hiring and staffing (HR) people to post jobs and find specific skillset talent,as SEO, SEM and web analytics experts are hard to find :)

Some of the top SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing groups online, you can join for free!

Group Info:
SEO SEM PPC SMO Search Engine Optimization,digital forum for professionals / Experts, business owners, entrepreneurs, advertisers, email & affiliate marketers, webmasters, online marketing, Analytics, Mobile, Gaming, Internet ecommerce with Google,Yahoo, MSN Bing. Feel free to join, post jobs & ask!
Currently having 4,335 members
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=71207

SEO SEM Group:
Group Info:
Facebook Group with top search marketing professional, organic and PPC. Share information with some of the ignited minds in the internet industry.
URL: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29114212202

Internet Marketing Group:
Group Info:
Orkut Group for SEO and online marketing, currently having 850+ members
URL: http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Community?cmm=19447047


SEO SEM (Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing)
Group Info:
Group with people across the search marketing and internet/ecommerce platform. Includes students, pros, hiring and business leaders too.
URL: http://www.brijj.com/group/seointernetmarketing

Feel free to add your comments and feedback.

Jan 2010 data for Top 10 US Search Providers

Latest data about who is searching what and who is searching where is out.... Checkout the table below for the Top search providers ( Jan 2010) and its the US  geography considered. Google has lost one percentage in search compared to the last while Bing is  gaining. With this data now innovative search marketers and online marketing companies can now target the top searched internet properties and design a killer marketing strategy accordingly. Top 10 Search Providers for January 2010, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)
Rank	Provider	Searches (000)	Share of Searches
	All Search	10,272,099	100.0%
1	Google Search	6,805,424	66.3%
2	Yahoo! Search	1,488,476	14.5%
3	MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search	1,116,546	10.9%
4	AOL Search	251,762	2.5%
5	Ask.com Search	194,161	1.9%
6	My Web Search	112,356	1.1%
7	Comcast Search	59,608	0.6%
8	Yellow Pages Search	35,101	0.3%
9	NexTag Search	34,736	0.3%
10	BizRate Search	20,123	0.2%
Source: The Nielsen Company

Top Keywords Social Media Buzz Online!

Effective campaigns, keyword research, deep down grilling of core-keywords, relevancy, Latent Semantic Indexing, Stemming, Long Tail Keywords, synonyms, volume and traffic, KEI etc etc all lead to gather one common thing - what is the page or site is about and what it want to achieve with SEO & Internet Marketing Techniques.

In the media world where all the leading SEO, SEM Pros are fighting for each 'word', here is an overview how the online marketing and social media buzz words as compared to top social properties such as Twitter, Myspace, Youtube, Digg & Flickr.

After looking at these charts, one can get an idea which keywords are in high demand, whats latest and which keywords are user talking about in the www.

These charts are just provided to give you a birds eye view, no guarantees of accuracy, all info is brought to you by sitevolume.com ( we are not anyway associated with the said site)

Digg's latest SEO / SEM buzz shows PPC is the top keyword searched and/or talked about, followed by SEM: 

Flickr's latest trending buzz shows SEM is the top keyword searched and/or talked about with no major competition as surveyed: 

Myspace users also talk about SEM and it is the top keyword online:  

Here comes Twitter's latest internet marketing buzz shows PPC is the top keyword searched and/or talked about, followed by SEM, chart a bit matching with Digg: 

Last but not the least Youtube's latest online marketing buzz shows SEM is the top keyword searched and/or talked about, followed by SMO, 

so now its upto all those search marketers, twitters and buzz creators online to take what they wish to extract from the analysis drawn.

This Month's Performance Report - Ranking Sense !

Top Queries from Search Traffic

The top queries driving traffic to RankingSense.blogspot.com from search engines. Updated monthly. (alexa)

Query

Percent of Search Traffic

1	tweeter ppc	5.23%
2	tweeter google ppc	3.98%
3	learn seo india blog	2.98%
4	google top keywords in india	2.96%
5	bookmarks online google flickr tweeter url	2.96%
6	top ten smo sites	2.96%
7	tweeter client ppc	2.67%
8	gmail clean and tweater	2.10%
9	tweeter tools marketing search	2.01%
10	top searched on google	1.96%

High Impact Search Queries for RankingSense.blogspot.com

Popular queries that are relevant to this site and are actively targeted by competitors advertising on search engines.

Query	Impact Factor	Query Popularity	QCI
google ppc	9.09	33	81
learn seo india	7.47	5	40
learn seo india blog	5.65	5	30
google top keywords	3.59	18	53
learn seo	3.36	34	57
seo sem	2.83	36	52
seo india	2.56	49	71
and seo	2.50	8	50
internet marketing	2.47	56	82
seo training in india	2.36	15	58
tweeter	2.26	59	20
tweeter tool	2.13	16	67
social networking sites in india	2.09	20	39
web marketing	2.09	47	85
internet markeing	1.91	13	58
forum cms	1.89	22	75
top 10 social networking sites	1.86	27	35
marketing search	1.75	8	55
social networks	1.58	45	51
seo tools	1.57	53	62
pocket pc	1.53	49	49
top keywords	1.41	31	47
marketing buzz	1.39	14	53
internet markeing learn	1.28	5	100
seo ranking	1.25	29	66
social networking	1.25	49	56
top searched on google	1.24	8	10
free seo training	1.23	23	53
social media	1.16	53	63
social networking website	1.13	25	66