Search Engine Optimization and Why You Need It

With so many people touting the virtues of PPC as a way to get people to your website instantly, the benefits of natural search engines rankings can get lost in the shuffle despite the dramatic advantages they offer.

I want to take a few minutes here to explain why every website needs to be spending at least a little time making sure their website is optimized for the search engines.

If you're already making all the money you could ever want using Pay Per Click advertising methods, then you can stop reading here, but if you're not yet enormously wealthy, you may wish to continue.

First of all, when it comes to Pay Per Click advertising, many savvy Internet users have learned to ignore them - they may show up on the page, but the web user doesn't even see them. They're only concerned with those 10 "natural" or "organic" listings - i.e. those search engine listings where the website owner didn't just offer to pay the most money per click to get on the first page of the search engine listings.

In a recent survey of Internet users, 85% of them said they tend to ignore sponsored listings. That means that if you are using only PPC to generate revenue for your business, you'll be busy fighting with all the other advertisers for a mere 15% of the market while those who focused on getting high search engine rankings have 100% of market available to them.

Have you ever heard anyone ever say they tend to ignore regular search engine listings and only want to look at ads? Unless you're a marketer analyzing the competition, probably not!

There's also a trust factor at work here. People are naturally skeptical of advertisers - it's just the nature of the beast. In fact, over 90% of Internet users have said that they trust the organic search engine results MORE than they trust sponsored results. As you may be starting to realize you're facing an uphill battle when a visitor does decide to click on your Pay Per Click ad. Not only are most of users ignoring you, eliminating a big portion of your potential market, most of them are clicking on your ad with a lot of skepticism.

And if the fact that your message is more trusted and not ignored with natural search engine rankings haven't convinced you to at least give it a try, then you may want to know that natural search engine rankings are Free! You can't pay to get a top search engine ranking, and you never have to pay a fee when someone clicks on a link to visit your website.

While not all search engine rankings last, especially if you neglect them, some of them can last indefinitely. I've had a website that for the past 3 years has ranked in the top ten for it's main keyword.

I've done almost nothing to maintain that ranking, yet that single top ten listing makes me thousands of dollars each month and I don't spend any money advertising the site. While I've had a lot of competitors come and who who've tried to make it by doing Pay Per Click, I've managed to sell my product at a higher price simply because my website is listed near the top of the natural search engine listings.

And you want to know another valuable part of top ten search engine rankings? While they may not always be easy to get, once you get them they are frequently easy to maintain as long as you have a high quality website. For example, if someone is writing a story on horse racing, and they find your site at number 1, and it provides a lot of useful content on the subject of horse racing, they're very likely to link to your site as a valuable resource on the subject. That means that with new people linking to you without you even asking for you, you're that much more likely to maintain your top ten ranking.

If you're not already taking advantage of natural search engine rankings to drive traffic (and sales!) to your website, then it's time to get started.