Digital Marketing Direction: Web Analytics, SEO & PPC

By Erica Wenham, Tuesday 06 November 2012.

Digital Technologies For Marketing (Week 7)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

According to Chaffey and Smith, (2007,p.253) search engine marketing has been described as “promoting an organisation through search engines to meet its objectives by delivering relevant content in the search listings for searchers and encouraging them to click through to a destination site”.

According to Lieb (2009, p.783), “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and the science of getting a website to appear prominently in organic search engine results when a search submits a query relevant to that website”.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves attaining the highest position or ranking in the natural or organic listings shown in the main body of the search engine results page (SERPS). This is across a range of specific combination of keywords or key phrases entered by the user of the search engine.

It is vital that marketers understand the process how search engines compile an index by sending what is known as ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’ to crawl across the sites that are registered with that search engine.

Spiders’ or ‘Robots’ are software processes, technically known as robots, employed by search engines to index web pages of registered sites on a regular basis. They follow links between pages and record reference URL of a page for future analysis.

According to Lieb, (2009, p.790) ‘The purpose of the crawl is to identify relevant pages for indexing and assess whether they have changed. The ‘crawling’ process is performed by the spiders (robots), who access web pages and retrieve a reference URL off the page for later analysis and indexing.  This process is recursive, each link followed will find additional links which too need to be ‘crawled’.

Indexing is created to enable the search engine to rapidly find the most relevant pages containing the query typed by the searcher.  However, instead of searching each individual page for a query or phrase, the search engine ‘inverts’ the index to produce a lookup table of documents containing particular words. The index information consists of phases stored within a document, as well as other information characterising the page such as the titles or meta description.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

According to Brassington & Pettitt , (2009,p.485) the term ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC) “is a way of advertising or marketing your product or business” best explained as “the advertiser pays only on performance by paying for each click made on the advertisement. Meaning is there are no clicks, and then there is no fee.

The system is also known as CPC (cost per click) and less commonly, pay per action. The latter being where a visitor might complete an action from the ad, ticking a box to receive a newsletter, for example – and the publisher receives a (higher) fee only is the action is completed. This concept can be extended to paying a commission if the user actually makes a purchase after clicking on the ad”. The cost of PPC varies widely and is largely dependent on the keywords being ‘purchased’. Click throughs can range from a few pennies to hundreds of pounds per click.