LITTLE GUIDE TO E-COMMERCE ( part 2)

Search Engines PPP and positioning

Positioning
You can pay some web positioning company to be at the top of the list of some search engine (i.e. for making your web site appear in first page on the search engine under specific search terms such as travel, clothes, mortgage and so on depending on your business). In this way you can get lots of people visiting your site. However, there two disadvantages: 1) it is usually very expensive; 2) you can only be top of the list if you continue to pay. Within a few months from stopping payments to web positioning company, your site will have been pushed back with the other thousands of websites.

TIP: In order to pick a  web positioning company that is good at positioning, go on Google.com (or whatever) and type the word 'search engine positioning' or 'or search engine optimization' or 'search engine ranking', etc.

Several people would like to 'work their way up' themselves. This is a great strategy; however, it takes several months to see results, in some cases years, and in some cases good results are never obtained. Most people abandon this option as soon as they appreciate its difficulties, after a few weeks of working on it. The so-called free visits are so only theoretically speaking...given the hundreds of hours involved to obtain good results.

Often people ask me some advice on this matter, but quite frankly I never know what to reply. I could say 'I am not very good at this' or I could say 'do you really think that if I knew I would tell you?'...which is practically the same thing.


Advertising on search engines (pay per placement or pay per ranking)
Adversing on search engines is very expensive but also very effective. There are essentially two approaches: the Google Approach (which uses Adwords) and the Overture Approach (now also used by others)

The Google Adwords approach is very simple: do not mix advertising with searching. When you look for something in Google, have a look to the right of the screen and you'll see a number of sponsored links. It may seem like non-effective way of advertisisng, but on the contrary it is excellent. This is because the people who click on the link are generally very interested users, someone who does not want to spend ages looking through hundreds of free sites.

The Overture Approach has been different from the very beginning. The client with the best offer (i.e. the one who offers more money) is put at the top of the search results. In this way, the free sites are placed after the paying sites (in 1999, during the golden age for internet, when you typed some very popular English words, you would find 3-4 pages of sponsored links before the free sites, in some cases even more...).

Before making any decisions, you have to consider that for some competitive words you may have to pay quite a bit of money (it could be up to 1 $ per click or even more) per click. Just think that I have seen some words for which you have to pay up to 9 $ per click!!! (This latter is however quite an exception). On average, you may have to pay between 5 and 15 cents per click, but obviously more depending on the keyword (how the keyword is competitive).The advantage of this method is that within a very short period of time you can see whether or not this is working, given that search engines have an immense number of users on a daily basis and some words are clicked very frequently.
Within a few days you'll have a good idea of how things are working and whether you need to change somehting in your site or whether to abandon the whole thing. My suggestion is to start with a small investment and then slowly increase it when your profit increases. If your profits are not increasing, try to undertand why this happens. Is it that people don't click on the link? Or is it that when they reach your site they soon leave it? Or they land on your site and seem to like it, but do not buy? You need to carefully analyse the consumers behaviour.

As I was saying earlier, this method of advertising is very expensive. However, it is (usually) very fast and very efficient. Just consider that Google is the greatest search engine in the world, and that being first on Overture also means being first on Altavista, Yahoo and MSN which are also very respectable; therefore, you can literally join the Olympus of Internet, as long as you have enough money to invest.

Below are the links for advertising on Google AdWords and Overture.

Google (You will be automatically placed in other important local search engines)

Overture Delivers Results You Can't Ignore. Only Overture search listings reach over 80% of active U.S. Internet users with just one buy.
 

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