Search Engine Optimisation Blog - SEO

In this article I aim to express 5 reasons why organic (the left side of Google) search engine optimisation is worth the time and effort.

• It’s what Google was made for, and its what people generally use Google for. Good positioning in the organic listing of Google is much more likely to increase traffic to your site over pay per click (right side of Google) campaign.
• You have no budgets; your site won’t disappear from the listings after being clicked 20 times.
• The coding used in your site will be clean, modern and W3C compliant.
• The addition of a good navigation, with your keyword phrases throughout the pages and topical sites pointing links back to your website equals long term success.
• You would have nothing to show for months of pay per click marketing if you were to stop, with organic search engine optimisation your site would have built a page rank and would be starting to appear in organic listings.

Overall, I feel people are generally put off by the timescale of organic search engine optimisation over the instant results of pay per click. However, pay per click offers no long-term benefits and will not generate as much traffic to your site as organic SEO. For these reasons I recommend each client to opt for organic SEO over PPC.

Bounce rates also known, as exit rates can be a crucial part of analysing how well your site is performing in the online arena. Bounce rates indicate what pages are either letting your site down or leading it to successful conversions. However, it seems to be a touch and go subject, with many people unsure what they exactly mean.

What is a bounce rate?

Put simply, it is the rate of which people leave your site without visiting any other pages. The lower your bounce rate the better your site is performing.

Analysing bounce rates

So what is a good bounce rate, Avinash Kaushik a Google Analytics specialist quoted “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

Help is at hand

If you find your site has a high bounce rate, there are many ways to improve it. First is finding out what the possible causes may be, usually its from either poor design or bad usability. Other than these it could be due to poor content on the site, or that you are being found on Google for unrelated terms to your company. Resulting in users leaving the site on entry. Second, is correcting these potential problems, at Creare Communication we offer a range of search engine optimisation services to improve your sites bounce rate and higher conversion rates.

Wait how do I find out my bounce rates?

There are many applications that you can use to track your websites analytics. At Creare Communications we implement Google Analytics into each of our sites, which offer monthly detailed reports including bounce rates, conversion rates, average time people spend on your site and much more.
To find out more about these services click here.

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content websites/blogs, where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers bid on keywords they believe their target market would type in the search bar when they are looking for a product or service. When a user types a keyword query matching the advertiser’s keyword list, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser’s ad may be shown. These ads are called a “Sponsored link” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to, and sometimes, above the natural or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster/blogger chooses on a content page.

Pay per click ads may also appear on content network websites. In this case, ad networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network attempt to provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved.

While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50), these prices are often referred to as Costs Per Click (CPC). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.