Introduction to Optimization and Pay Per Click
Building an online presence for a Frum business takes a lot more than just putting up a website. Once that website is live, the next task is getting traffic to your website. Online traffic generation falls into two major categories. Traffic can come to your website naturally or by paying for the visitors. Each traffic generation strategy has its costs, advantages and disadvantages, so it is important to consider both traffic online traffic strategies when marketing your site.
The easiest online marketing strategy is called Paid Search. Paid search is also known as Pay per Click or Search Engine Marketing. This traffic strategy is the most expensive and at the same the most manageable. Paid search ads are the search listings listed on the sides or tops of search results on the major search engines. The mechanics of paid search are too complex for this article (they are addressed in the Paid Search explanation) so we will only discuss an overview. Paid search allows one to bid on the search keywords for the results in which they would like their website to show. On each keyword there is an auction market where the highest bidder gets the top listing, and second highest bidder the next listing and so forth. The bid price is how much a website owner is willing to pay per click on your link, so this can get quite expensive if you are not turning the clicks into sales. Each of the search engines allow you to create a three line ad for your link in which you can entice a user to click on your link. This can allow an ad not showing at the top to still get clicks. However, in order to be successful at paid search you would want to find keywords where you can be the number one or two bidder.
The second online marketing strategy is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This strategy employs reverse engineering the major search engines’ ranking algorithms. While it is not known exactly what causes a site to be ranked in a search engine, the search engines do give us an idea of how one can be in the best position to receive the best rankings. The basic idea behind search engine algorithms is to show a user the results that are most applicable for what they are searching for. As before, the details of SEO are too complex for this article but one example of a ranking parameter is “backlinks.” A backlink is another site linking your website for a specific search term. In theory the more websites that link to your website as the expert for that search term, the more likely your site actually is the expert. (In order to get the most backlinks possible you want to build the type of site another site would want to link to.) Getting listed and ranked in the search engines can take many months and even up to a year, so this strategy requires patience and constant effort.