Ok, so you have a website that impresses] your associates, but do you have a website that impresses your clients? In fact, are you getting the visitors to your website that you really need to ensure it is sensible? Sadly, most website managers do not get the payback on their Online Marketing spend that is practical and a prominent Search Engine Placement is a thing they are very unlikely to achieve. Today we’ll consider a typical search results page and look at how, with the assistance of a Website Optimization Company, you could reap the greatest reward from your Online Marketing investment.

If you use Google (which most people do) you’ll already be familiar with the look of their results page. You type in say, “Website Optimization Company” and you’ll get two sets of results returned. Down the right hand side of the page (sectioned off by a vertical bar and across the top of the results section (with a pastel coloured background) you’ll see a set of results titled “sponsored links”. These are chargeable adverts. They are kept separate so it’s quite clear that they are paid for.

The organisations that place these adverts usually pay nothing up front, but they will pay a small sum each time any searcher clicks on one of the links. This is known as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. The remainder of the results on your page (if you’re using Google) will be what are often known as “Organic” results. No payment needed for these entries, just a fair amount of savvy and a fair amount of hard work.

Whilst PPC advertising could well be an significant part of your Online Marketing plan as you look for a good Search Engine Placement, surveys have shown conclusively that search engine users place greater trust in organic results than in PPC adverts. This isn’t particularly surprising. Organic Search Engine Placement tends to be earned rather than bought. To be on page one of Google or any other modern search engine, you’ll need to have a webpage that is relevant and authoritative in the opinion of the search engines. Only by filtering the results effectively, can the search engine ensure it serves up exactly what the searcher is seeking.

The sophistication of the search engines means that they have many ways of making sure your site meets their criteria. In days gone by, it was possible to fool the search engines into serving up your website to an unsuspecting searcher no matter how suitable (or unsuitable!) it was. Thankfully, we no longer have that problem. Search engines such as Google use very subtle algorithms to determine the relevance of a result with the fundamental reasoning being that for a site to rank highly on a results page, especially for a common or competitive search word, that site will almost certainly require some citations – that is, it will need to be linked to by an authoritative source.

The downside, if indeed it is a downside, is that you now need to work much harder to achieve the ranking necessary to get your site to the top of the listings. Whilst there are many “On-Page” modifications that can be made to your web site that will ensure it has the best possible chance of being indexed appropriately by the search engines, that first page search slot will be tricky to achieve without the assistance of a Website Optimization Company and a comprehensive and considered Online Marketing campaign.

A good Website Optimization Company will advise you on those localized coding changes you can make yourself, help you decide which keywords and phrases will achieve the best Search Engine Placement for you and then go on to produce a full Online Marketing campaign. This should ensure that your company’s reputation as relevant and authoritative is reinforced and recognised by the search engines thereby helping make a page one Search Engine Placement a reality with all the business benefits that bestows.

In recent years there has been a recognised improvement in technology. This recognised improvement can be identified in the growth of the internet. The use of the internet at home has risen so that 70% of the United Kingdom had access to the internet at home in 2009. This is an rise of 28% since 2006. Unquestionably this has necessitated a change in the way products and businesses are promoted, because of the way within which the online market has grown. This has caused it to take over from the “traditional” marketing techniques. These new marketing techniques are normally called Online Marketing.

Online marketing is a way of advertising and marketing products and businesses using the online world. It is used to market exclusively through the Internet via processes such as making banner ads, sending e-mails to prospective clients, building an ecommerce website, etc.

One of the most successful ways to try online marketing is by search engine optimisation. This is done through the use of decent Search Engine Placement. Search engines look for websites that use the keywords and search criteria entered by the searcher. Relevant websites are then displayed to the user in order of the keywords in the search criteria. If your website has these keywords and search criteria within it’s content then it will appear higher in the search engine results list. Search Engine Placement can be seen as one of the simplest and most popular ways to use online marketing to the best of your advantage. By positioning the keywords into your site it will be listed higher on the search engine results list if that criteria is searched for. This will make your website more obvious to the general public and means that it should get more customers and as a result of that more trade (although this is not certain).

To attain a high search engine placement one may employ a Website Optimization Company. A Website Optimization Company is a company specifically designed to help with the marketing of a business in the online world, specifically in the line of Website Optimization Company and search engine optimisation. This is the use of search engines for marketing and advertising of a product. The main strategy is to use search engine placement and although this may seem easy and perfectly possible on your own it is something that would be advisable to get help and support for. The expertise of a website optimisation company use their knowledge and experience to identify which keywords to use and how to position them on the main or home page of your website. These skills is invaluable.

It is by the use of online marketing that your business can continue to mature and compete in this modern technological era. Through the specific use of search engine optimisation and search engine placement your business could storm ahead and it is through the employment of an SEO Company that will give you the best chance of success. This is a market that is growing at a fantastic rate and whilst it can appear hard to get on top of, taking but a few simple steps makes it very easy to improve your chances.

The news would have us believe that the Internet is the new marketplace, Online Marketing organisations and sellers of Search Engine Placement services market on the basis that with no a web presence that is optimised and situated on page one of all search engine first pages there is no point in being in business. There is of course a different thought, and one that is based on sitting website marketing into an overall strategy and using a competent Website Optimization Company to add to established sales methods.

I can imagine at this point the Online Marketing providers would ask, what is the point in being on the Internet if no-one knows you’re there? True enough, but then my argument is that there are traditional sales techniques that will increase your company’s visibility on the Internet and feed Internet trade whilst making sure that the invoice from your chosen Website Optimization Company is at the minimum.

Indicative trading data for the UK this Christmas period (2009) show that less than Ten percent of all retail sales were made via the internet. What makes this figure even more unanticipated is that there were a number of issues that should have made the net a much more attractive option. The UK was in the midst of the worst big freeze for 30 years and also still in the depths of a recession. Additionally, there has never been more quality internet businesses available and uncertainty caused by the postal strikes had been overcome by the majority of web based traders.

So why are the Internet trading numbers not a much more considerable percentage of the retails sales figures just published?

There are some products that sell well on the net and there are those that do not. Entertainment and digital items (DVD’s, music etc) plus hardware and gadgets sell with ease. The vast majority of goods do not – food, clothing etc. I would even go so far as to say that no matter what you spend in Search Engine Placement the vast bulk of services ( as opposed to products) do not sell well.

Why is it so? With website design processes which offer interactivity and visual experiences improving all the time one would expect any item to sell. Not the case. It comes down to habits and human nature. The practice of browsing in the real world and buying in the virtual is as common as ever ( although interestingly not as well publicised as it used to be), buyer behaviour hasn’t changed for ages and the vast majority of retail sales are made by women (genetically programmed to browse, touch and feel before making a purchase). The Internet shopping experience simply isn’t satisfying enough for us.

Is the answer therefore, for those products and services (which are in the majority), a high street marketplace presence? With established brand development through advertising and a website that supports the high street. As the brand develops then organic searching requirements will become minimal (I suspect very few people search for “trains to London on the West Coast” now that Virgin Rail is so well known).

Get a spot on the high street I say.

If your company has a website then it is currently one of over 2 billion out there in the Internet. Unless all your customers know the unique location of your site ( url ) the chances are that they have arrived at your site by searching on some word of interest to them. Do you understand why or how this process guides them to your site ?

Search engines first came into being in the early 1990s and the understanding that web sites could be optimised to take advantage of this indexation began to develop a few years later. The early versions of search engines like Altavista simply took the supplied url of the web page and stored it on it’s own server. A separate indexer program would subsequently extract the relevant links and cross references for use by the searchers.

The number of companies having web sites grew and marketers began to appreciate the benefits that a high ranking or Search Engine Placement gave. Online Marketing came of age and bit by bit online retailing increased in volume and turnover. Some companies were more suited to on-line retailing than others, for example electronic goods. Others may never quite take the place of conventional retailing e.g. women’s clothing as the need to touch, feel and try on influences purchasing habits.

The main success stories have been in the service industries where online references have thrived because of advertising revenue. It is now possible to access crossword dictionaries, thesauri and a host of other facilities to help solve a variety of puzzles, quizzes and simply to answer general knowledge questions. Travel companies like RyanAir now take most of their bookings and over the last year have to people to check in online to avoid luggage fees.

The US Census Bureau recorded in 2007 that some 3.2% of retail sales were done via e-commerce. Within this overall total the percentage of e-commerce transactions between different business trades varied widely with food and beverage stores less than 1% and mail order and electronic shopping at 44%.
In the UK Ocado has revealed this week that revenue soared 49% in the week before Christmas, reaching £8.9 million, as the online grocer delivered 3.5 million items to 42,000 customers.
The IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index shows that British shoppers spent £5.3 billion online in November 09.

The for a high Search Engine Placement also resulted in a sector of web design called search engine optimisation and with it came the Website Optimization Company. Today there are a number of companies who will offer a service designed to get your company web site a high Search Engine Placement. Not all of these companies will do it necessarily in an ethical manner. A Website Optimization Company has often been classified as white hat or black hat, this is because black hat refers to the use of aggressive techniques and tactics that focus solely on the search engines and the short term benefits that come with visitor figures. White hat companies focus on the customer or human audience with a view to build trust and empathy for a site.

There are many techniques to bear in mind when designing, developing and promoting a web site. If you do not have the skills in your company to maximise the number of visitors to your site make sure that you get a trusted Website Optimization Company to work with you to accomplish this. The rewards will more than pay for the effort.

As a Search Engine Optimization Firm it is imperative that you provide a good level of service to your customers, which includes results applicable to them at every step of the way. If not you will spend all your energy locating new clients because the old, disappointed ones, leave you behind in search of a more effective provider, who actually delivers. This is clearly not a great way to develop a financially sound organization, keeping a client is far less expensive than attracting a new one!

The whole intention of Online Marketing, and in particular search engine optimization, is to produce increased business through an internet site by the positioning of that website higher up the search engine results pages. This works on the basis that, the higher up the listings the website appears, the more the searching populous will see it, click through to the page and at the end of the day, with a bit of luck purchase from it. Of course this is right, but there are some finer details that really need to be considered and accepted by the Website Optimization Company if the actual intention is going to be achieved and the client contented.

The key thing here is that the website optimization organisation could actually make a spectacular improvement to the Search Engine Placement of a business’s website, but the actual numbers of visitors to that business’s website would remain almost unchanged. Why? It tricky to argue that moving a website from page 345 of the search results to page 6 is a not a spectacular improvement, it is. The optimization company will have moved the website hundreds of pages higher than it was, sounds fantastic. However, the reality is that virtually no searchers will look beyond page 1, possibly 2 at the most, so being on page three, four or even six is almost as bad as page 345! No one looks that far and therefore no visitors will click through to the site.

Unfortunately this is where a lot of website optimization firms go wrong, they promote services, albeit the minimum package, that will make an progression such as this but will basically show no return to the client. This client then needs to make a a decision, should he, as suggested by the Website Optimization Company, pay the extra money for the “next package up” when the first one was useless? Or does he cut his losses and try someone else who may actually be able to achieve the goal? The problem here is that the “standard package” was simply not worth anything to the client at all and as such it should not have been sold to him. All that has been achieved at this point is that the effort and expense that the optimization business went to in order to attract the client (which is considerable) has been put at risk for a short term fee. It would have been far smarter to charge a reasonable fee for achieving a result that can be seen and felt by client and optimizer alike, so that the trust and confidence in the relationship is developed. It is only in this position that the optimization organisation will start to keep hold of those all valuable customers and develop long term connections.