ADVICE
Midas Media
SEO is dead.
long live SEO?
With last year’s Google algorithm updates causing some
digital marketing ‘experts’ to once again proclaim that SEO
is dead, should your business be ditching search engine
optimisation altogether in favour of its paid cousin, PPC?
M
any businesses
have already begun
to slow down their
spending on SEO
and it seems that
PPC is the flavour of the month.
Are they just two sides of the
same coin or is it worth picking
and choosing?
WHAT IS SEO?
SEO, or search engine
optimisation, refers to the
practice of naturally maximising
the potential of a website’s
ranking power on search engine
results pages. There are many
arguments about what is good
and bad practice in SEO, but in
general, building a great, userfriendly site, acquiring high
authority links back to it, and
optimising the HTML code will
all help grow your website’s
authority on Google (notice that
I specify Google as, although
optimising for Yahoo and Bing
doesn’t hurt, Google gets
around 89% of UK search
engine traffic).
Many of the techniques that
were popular and effective
in the early days of SEO,
such as submitting websites
to hundreds of low quality
directories and writing
keyword-heavy copy, have been
hit hard by Google algorithm
updates. However, this is
nothing new and it is certainly
not a reason to think that
SEO is a dying art. It has been
happening for years as Google
continues to fine tune its search
engine to make it as relevant as
possible for its users.
As Google’s search engine
algorithm matures, our SEO
strategy has followed suit.
Now more than ever, creating
quality and engaging content is
invaluable to enhancing your
website’s authority online.
‘Social’ is also gaining ever
more power and intertwining
with all aspects of SEO.
However, link building is
still incredibly powerful and
Google’s head of webspam,
Matt Cutts, has said that
“Backlinks still have many,
many years left in them”.
WHAT IS PPC?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is when
advertisers pay the publishing
website or search engine
each time their ad is clicked.
Typically, this is done through
Google AdWords and the paid
ads can be seen at the top as
well as at the right-hand side
of a search engine results page,
or SERPs for short. Each search
engine has its own version of
PPC that works in a similar
way; bidding on clicks known
as cost per click (CPC), or
bidding on impression cost per
mile (CPM), the advertising
cost per thousand views.
Pay-per-click
campaigns
are immune
to the pitfalls
of algorithm
updates,
unlike SEO,
and it gives
your business
a level
playing field
128 September 2014
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29/08/2014 14:38