SEOs may work in-house for an organization, or as consultants, and search engine optimization may be only part of their daily functions. Often their education of how search engines function comes from interacting and discussing the topics on forums, through blogs, at popular conferences and seminars, and by experimentation on their own sites. There are few college courses that cover online marketing from an ecommerce perspective that can keep up with the changes that the web sees on a daily basis.

SEO, as a marketing strategy, can often generate a good return. However, as the search engines are not paid for the traffic they send from organic search, the algorithms used can and do change, there are no guarantees of success, either in the short or long term. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, SEO is often compared to traditional Public Relations (PR), with PPC advertising closer to traditional advertising. Increased visitors is analogous to increased foot traffic in retail advertising. Increased traffic may be detrimental to success if the site is not prepared to handle the traffic or visitors are generally dissatisfied with what they find. In either case increased traffic does not guarantee increased sales or success.

While endeavoring to meet the guidelines posted by search engines can help build a solid foundation for success on the web, such efforts are only a start. SEO is potentially more effective when combined with a larger marketing campaign strategy. Despite SEO potential to respond to the latest changes in market trends, SEO alone is reactively following market trends instead of pro-actively leading market trends. Many see search engine marketing as a larger umbrella under which search engine optimization fits, but it’s possible that many who focused primarily on SEO in the past are incorporating more and more marketing ideas into their efforts, including public relations strategy and implementation, online display media buying, web site transition SEO, web trends data analysis, HTML E-mail campaigns, and business blog consulting making SEO firms more like an ad agency.

In addition, whilst SEO can be considered a marketing tactic unto itself, it’s often considered (in the view of industry experts) to be a single part of a greater whole.Marketing through other methods, such as viral, pay-per-click, new media marketing and other related means is by no means irrelevant, and indeed, can be crucial to maintaining a strong search engine rank. The part of SEO that simply insures content relevancy and attracts inbound link activity may be enhanced through broad target marketing methods such as print, broadcast and out-of-home advertising as well.

The PageRank algorithm proved very effective, and Google began to be perceived as serving the most relevant search results. On the back of strong word of mouth from programmers, Google became a popular search engine. Off-page factors weighted more heavily than on-page factors as Google identified the manipulation of off-page to be more difficult.

Despite being difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Inktomi, an earlier search engine using similar off-page factors, had forced webmasters to develop link building tools and schemes to influence searches; these same tools proved applicable to Google’s PageRank system. Thus an online industry spawned focused on selling links designed to improve PageRank and link popularity. To drive human site visitors, links from higher PageRank pages sell for more money.

A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, though the displayed value is rounded to the nearest integer, and the toolbar is believed to be updated less frequently than the value used internally by Google. In 2002 a Google spokesperson stated that PageRank is only one of more than 100 algorithms used in ranking pages, and that while the PageRank toolbar is interesting for users and webmasters, “the value to search engine optimization professionals is limited” because the value is only an approximation. Many experienced SEOs recommend ignoring the displayed PageRank.

Google — and other search engines — have, over the years, developed a wider range of off-site factors they use in their algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Combined with increases in processing power, search engines have begun to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms. Around the same time as the work that led to Google, IBM had begun work on the Clever Project, and Jon Kleinberg was developing the HITS algorithm.

As a search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries can change continually, and algorithms can differ widely, with a web page that ranks #1 in a particular search engine possibly ranking #200 in another search engine, or even on the same search engine a few days later.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization. Based on these experiments, often shared through online forums and blogs, professional SEOs attempt to form a consensus on what methods work best, although consensus is rarely, if ever, actually reached.

SEOs widely agree that the signals that influence a page’s rankings include:

Keywords in the title tag.
Keywords in links pointing to the page.
Keywords appearing in visible text.
Link popularity.
(PageRank for Google) of the page.
Keywords in Heading Tag H1,H2 and H3 Tags in webpage.
Linking from one page to inner pages.
Placing punch line at the top of page.

There are many other signals that may affect a page’s ranking, indicated in a number of patents held by various search engines, such as historical data.

SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

Search engine optimization (SEO) as a subset of search engine marketing seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. The quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing first to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and secondly to human visitors. The term SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.

Search engine optimization is available as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because SEO often requires making changes to the source code of a site, it is often most effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term “Search Engine Friendly” to describe designs, menus, Content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

A range of strategies and techniques are employed in SEO, including changes to a site’s code (referred to as “on page factors”) and getting links from other sites (referred to as “off page factors”). These techniques include two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who utilize them, as either “white hat SEO”, or “black hat SEO”.Other SEOs reject the black and white hat dichotomy as an over-simplification.

Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference named AirWeb was created to discuss bridging the gap and minimizing the sometimes damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.
Some more aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client websites.

Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned. Google’s Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site optimization: Google’s, Yahoo!’s, MSN’s and Ask.com’s. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! has Site Explorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program and Google has a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals.

Helpisland Answer: On the Pay Per Click side of Search Engine Marketing you never need to pay more then the minimum allowed by the search engine. So basically 5 or 10 cents is the most you ever pay per click. This method requires a lot more work and “skill” if you will because you have to come up with longtail keyword combinations, typos, and misspellings.

As far as placement goes really I do not put that much into it. I have found that I get more clicks being 1,2,3 then bad for 4,5,6,7 but ok for 8,9,10 spots. I think this stems from the same explanation as SEO that people either click on the first results or scroll to the bottom and find something that catches there eye.

I think the most important thing is your CTR (click through ratio). There are tricks you should know to increase this that really have something to do with even your ad copy. If you can create your text ad like this:

>>>Google Search<<<

A good search engine

Try google adsense

www.google.com

Notice “>>>” and “<<<” before and after your site’s name. That is a nice eye tracking trick that for me increased clicks by about 50% in Google Adworks. Discovering this for me was a HUGE THING because more clicks means a higher quality score which moves you up for more exposure which means you get more clicks.

Of course I just use “>>> and <<<” as a example, you can replace them use any other symbols, like $$$, ^^^, *** or %%%. I am sure this trick will help you increase your CTR.