How to get started with paid options

Help with pay-for optimisation required

[davey]

Hi there

This is my first time on this forum, and in fact any forum, and I must say it is fascinating. I live in the UK and have recently left school and have started working for my dad's business. About a year ago a friend designed a modest website for our business and I learned about search engine optimization and did this with the site - metatags, keywords, alt tags, hidden text, I even refreshed the site 1000 times a day to look popular! This worked great for six months and it brought in some good new business, however, enquiries have now dried up as competitors are starting to optimise and pay for site ranking (previously it was a backwards industry and they never bothered). Anyway, sorry for being so long-winded, it's just that I need some advice about how to improve ranking - we're going to need to pay some money somewhere to try to match the search engine popularity of our competitors, I wondered if someone out there could give me any hints about how to make best use of limited money?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards

Davey

[engine]

Hi Davey,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld. [webmasterworld.com]

The landscape is in constant change and WebmasterWorld is the place to be to keep up.

With your experience, you must already know which service/s are providing traffic. Then look at the paid options to get to those services. Some of the options include:

Altavista & Inktomi PPC [webmasterworld.com]
Google Adwords [webmasterworld.com]
Overture PPC [webmasterworld.com]

You'll find forums here for each one of these.

PPC offers you the facility to position your results by the amount of your bid. Explore the specific forums mentioned above to get an idea of the type of results you can expect.

You might also want to look to see what your competitors are doing. What service are they employing and what keyords are they working with.

I hope that's of help to start you off.

[IanTurner]

I would look at seeing if you can work out how much each visitor to the site is worth on average.

Once you have this information you can make PPC bids in the knowledge that you are probably going to get a return on investment.

[tosspot17]

Also, don't forget Espotting - a good UK pay per click engine (results appear on Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves in the UK).

[davey]

Thankyou all three of you for your helpful replies. I will research these PPC services. I am really only interested in UK exposure (I know the UK is highly dependent on the USA though) so if anyone out there has further advice on that, that would be great. You all seem to be suggesting PPC rather than paying a company to sort the site ranking for me with expertise on optimisation techniques or monitoring algorhythms (whatever they are), is that correct? Also, a number of my competitors seem to be getting top ranking with hardly any keywords/optimisation, how is this possible?!

[Skylo]

Hi Davey Welcome. I have a lot of traffic that comes from your part of the world and I am on Espotting PPC and it is a vital part of my business. So definitely start with them like Tosspot17 suggested:) As for paying someone to optimise your site for you....forget it. Why do that when you can learn your self. I finished school 2 years ago and started a tourism business and just from reading and recently coming to this forum I am more than self sufficient ( my site is no.1 for the search term we use and trust me it is highly competitive). I also have no formal training so wat do you have to lose. Make your dad proud and take time to learn the knowledge and optimise your site to the top. Keep smiling:)

[davey]

Thanks very much Skylo, that's really encouraging, I definitely intend to make my dad proud!

[tosspot17]

Davey,

If you're going to do your own optimisation and want to couple this with some UK pay per click campaigns then i'd go for;

Google Adwords UK- For me it generates the majority of my traffic, and it's good value too.
Overture UK - For some of our sites Overture is great, for some it's just too expensive. Select UK campaigns and you'll apear in MSN, Ask.co.uk and a load of other search engines (many ISP home pages - AOL, Freeserve etc.)
Espotting - Good value and gets you into Yahoo! and Ask.co.uk
Mirago - We don't get many click throughs, but they are cheap and appear on Ask.co.uk

I don't know how much knowledge you have of SEO, but this is a great place to learn, check out some of the posts like Brett's Successful site in 12 months with Google alone [webmasterworld.com...] which I know helped me loads when I was first getting started.

Good luck!
Chris.