There is no quick-fix key to online marketing success. Yet, with time and effort utilizing ethical search engine optimization techniques will improve your web site’s ranking and drive more web traffic to your company’s web site. But, the concept to stress here is ethical SEO techniques.

Search engines are all premised on providing their users with the information and web pages that are most relevant to the search query that users type into the search interface. Google’s famed “Don’t Be Evil” corporate ethos restated for SEO-types is: “Don’t rig the system to rank less relevant pages.”

There are a number of “quick-fixes” for web pages and web sites that do not rank well for keyword terms on Google and the other search engines. The downside of such “quick-fixes” - keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, paid and dubious links etc. - is that sooner or later (most often, sooner) the search engines will clue into such well-known “Black Hat” SEO tactics, resulting in a permanent banning of the offensive website, or at least a temporary de-listing until the offensive and misleading tweaks are removed from the site. And Google, Yahoo! and the other search engines reserve a contractual right to de-list a site in their Terms of Service.

The Internet is the much-touted “Information Super Highway”. The price for claiming your roadside frontage is creating relevant content that users are looking for online. There are a raft of “White Hat” techniques that will attract web traffic and users to your website, but each of these requires a sustained effort to create relevant content and link structures. While such “White Hat” or ethical SEO techniques - blogging, article writing, participation in relevant forums and directories - take more effort and time to build a site’s relevancy, their effect is much longer lasting and you do not run the risk of having your site shut down peremptorily as a result of trying to game the system. In a “Don’t be Evil” world, “Content is King”, and the creation of quality content and relevant inbound links to your site is the hallmark of ethical and effective SEO and online marketing.

As online marketing and advertising begin to outstrip traditional advertising media - TV, radio and print -  as the medium that will drive customers to their office or storefront (whether that is a digital online office or storefront on a company’s web page, or the old-fashioned ‘bricks-and-mortar’ variety) businesses, large and small, are grappling with how to advertise and market their products and services online and what is the most effective way to do this. 

David Wei, CEO for Alibaba.com, a leading website providing business-to-business (or B2B) networking and connectivity, has observed that, “Going global has never been easier and more affordable for a small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME), especially from the relative comfort of one’s own factory, shop or home office.”  

Mr. Wei notes that, the “Internet has ushered in new tools to bring trading partners together using search engines, portals and online marketplaces.”  Mr. Wei notes that online marketing and B2B marketplaces like Alibaba.com are replacing traditional marketing venues like  trade shows, catalogues and trade associations, just as internet advertising is gradually replacing traditional print, TV and radio as source for advertising placements.

 Importantly, Alibaba.com’s CEO, points out the choice that all businesses, particularly small-to-medium sized enterprises (or SMEs), must face when taking their advertising and marketing campaigns online, or starting up a fresh marketing campaign, is whether to channel time, money and effort into paid advertising and marketing (the banner ads, and pay-per-click sponsored ads on Googl or Yahoo! etc.), or whether to invest those resources in organic marketing.

Pay-per-click has its place and a company can bid and pay for advertising spots, just like it would do for TV and other old media ads, but pay-per-click has its limitations.   “A search engine is more consumer-traffic driven with no budget guarantee,” Mr. Wei suggests, “so costs can accumulate without any reasonable assurance of sales. There is also a serious global issue of click fraud, whereby competitors click repeatedly to increase your pay-per-click advertising costs.”  ”At this time,” Mr. Wei says, “there is no known solution that can eliminate 100% of click fraud.”  With pay-per-click it can thus become difficult to know that you are paying for what you get.

The alternative to pay-per-click is to market and advertise online using the internet’s organic search capabilities to get your products and services noticed and ranked at the top of the search engines’ results page. There is nothing like having your site appear “above-the-fold”, so to speak, on the Google results page for the key words that describe your business to drive sales. While this is not “paid advertising” per se, there are definite costs in terms of the aforementioned resources of “time, money and effort” that an SME will need to expend building an effective online marketing campaign organically.

Mr Wei’s advice for small-to-medium sized enterprises is, that “it is best to have someone in-house with keyword marketing expertise. Otherwise, you should consider using marketing firms which have a proven success rate of getting companies to rank higher in search results.”

Sound advice. But even if an SME tries to build an in-house capability for online marketing, how can the business influencer or decision-maker be assured that the person they are looking to hire has the search engine optimization expertise to successfully orchestrate a full online marketing campagn, particularly if one’s marketing mix is to use both pay-per-click and organic search engine optimization? The answer may be to test the online marketing waters first and take your online marketing and online advertising campaigns to a company whose search engine optimization specialists have organic and pay-per-click experience.

ClickFraudNetwork report indicates that click fraud was up from 14.8% in the first quarter to 15.8% in quarter 2 of this year. The average click fraud rate on search engine content networks was 25.6% including Google AdSense.

For more information on Google AdSense, check out our pay-per-click advertising articles.

Inside Adsense announces Site Authentication; a recently launched feature that allows you to get ads on content protected by a user name and password.

Check out our article section for a basic overview on Google AdSense.

Search Engine Land’s article on optimizing your B2B pay-per-click campaign in just 4 hours a week contains important tips on a variety of parameters, including:

Keyword Research
Ad Testing
Landing Page Testing
Bidding

You can vist our article section for additional information on pay-per-click advertising.

Google announced on their adwords blog that they are expanding their pay-per-action Beta globally.

Advertisers who use adwords conversion tracking and receive more than 500 conversions in the most recent 30-day period will be invited to join the beta test, on a rolling basis..

You will be able to pay for completed actions that you define, ie; a completed sale. You can expect to pay more than you would for the regular adwords program so you better step up your ROI (return on investment) tracking.

I attended a 30 minute session on driving traffic to your website last week.

The entire presentation was built around Google adwords. In fairness to the presenter, 30 minutes is barely enough time for introductions, never mind a detailed presentation on Google, Yahoo and MSN. And the fact is that Google dominates the pay per click (PPC) market, so if you are going to talk aboout PPC, you have to talk about Google.

I was , however, suprised at how the presenter blew off yellow pages advertising and search engine optimization in the Q and A session.

The facts are that approximately approximatley 70% of search engine clicks are made on organic listings. Even if you don’t want to spend the money on SEO (search engine optimization), you should at least do the basics. Basic SEO info can be found all over the internet, just search for free SEO tips.

Print yellow pages is still the main resource for local searches. That’s right , print yellow pages. Keep in mind that results are industry specific. You may need a full page ad if you are an attorney but if you are renting computers, all you need is a listing or small space ad.

Don’t be fooled by someone who only sells only PPC or only SEO or only Yellow Pages. Chances are they are looking out for themselves and not for you. Do your homework, take responsibility for your own business.

eWhisper.net reports that Google Adwords now enables you to exclude up to 20 IP addresses.

Sounds great but there are some concerns you should be aware of. Internet service providers tend to use a range of IP addresses for all their users. If you exclude an IP address of a competitor, you may be excluding hundreds if not thousands of potential customers on the same IP.

Before you exclude an IP, you can check to see if the IP is dedicated to one company by going to DomainTools and checking the url of the domain. You can then do a reverse IP (think reverse phone look-up) and DomainTools will indicate if there is one or one thousand web sites on the IP in question.

Since search engines have moved towards quality-based bidding, the debate over the usefulness of bid management ttools has escalated. One session at the Search Marketing Expo consisted of a debate on the issue. Search Engine Watch has the recap.

Read our latest article on our top 7 tips to drive traffic to your website.