SEO vs SEM

Posted on February 27th, 2007 by Ian M

I do both SEO and SEM, and do them for different reasons. SEM is by far a much faster way to make money than doing SEO when starting out, but also more unpredictable and volatile.

For clarification’s sake:
SEO = Search Engine Optimization. Although used broadly to often encompass the entire internet marketing industry, I am using it is it’s more specific definition in this article to mean ranking well for organic search.
SEM = Search Engine Marketing. ie. Using PPC search engine ads

Ranking for the search engines organically can take some time, especially when only using White Hat methods. You can cut this time down by getting some great links to your site, but even then you will probably only rank semi-well for uncompetitive terms, if anything for a while.

Search engine marketing you can do immediately. You just buy ads on the search engines and send the traffic to your site. Even if you don’t want to invest a lot of money in traffic, you could still help yourself a great deal by starting off with some cheap PPC advertising to get eyeballs on your site. From here, they can bookmark it, tell their friends about it, submit it to a social bookmarking site, or even link to you. SEM will improve your SEO!

Even if you are just breaking even or possibly even losing money, the long term effect of your advertising could very well pay off in the form of future traffic. Although Google’s Quality Score is a pain for many arbitrageurs and PPC advertisers, it should actually make it easier for you to get at least some inexpensive traffic to your site, particularly if your ads are very closely related to your site content.

When SEM is Working On Its Own

You could find a great combination of low priced PPC traffic and a monetization method that pays you more than what you spend. This is an excellent situation to have, but it is often very unscalable. Often it only works when you are cutting yourself down to only the cheapest incoming traffic and once you increase your CPC, you see the profits diminish quickly.

Additionally, once you have that perfect setup, Google Adwords, or the other search engines could simply change their algorithm (like adding the Quality Score) or simply another advertiser could come in and take away your traffic by outbidding you. This can happen at any time. Plenty of people have noticed huge changes in income from these types of changes.

Adding SEO to your SEM sites can help you cushion your profits and make the site worth keeping and building. The good part about SEO is once you start doing well for one keyword, you often start doing well for others. If Google starts to see you as an authority or reputable site, other new content you create on the site would get indexed much faster than a new site starting out.

Performing SEO and getting higher organic rankings are generally a more long term play than SEM. The organic algorithm and results do not change near as fast as the ad market in search engines. SEO is a better long term play!

In essence, beginners should start with SEM to get the hang of the ads and get things going. Once you feel like you are happy and want to pursue the business seriously, then you can start thinking about building your own sites and growing them with both more SEM and SEO.

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Filed under: SEM, SEO, Internet Marketing Industry

Wordpress vs Drupal

Posted on February 18th, 2007 by Ian M

On my first sites, I used a webpage editing program and designed my site page by page. When I wanted to make a change in the menu, I had to go through each page and make sure to make the menu change exactly the same. Small changes would take twenty to sixty minutes sometimes. Life became a lot easier when I switched to using a content management system (CMS).

Wordpress is the best CMS for blogs. It’s free, widely supported, easy to use, and has all the of functionality you need (especially with all the plugins the users create for it.) Wordpress was the first CMS I used and it was great for the first blog sites I managed.

Now though I want to make more sites organized by content than organized by time. With a blog, people generally just read the most recent posts. Unless you have a popular blog, or have a post with a lot of reference material, the traffic for the older posts fades away. Additionally, a high traffic blog requires a relatively large amount of time dedicated to it. There a lots of blogs to compete with and infrequent or poor quality posting will kill your traffic.

If you want a site with less maintenance and more potential for a long term income, you need content that lasts a fair amount of time. Reference material and articles on larger themes are better suited for this. Organization of this material is important so people can understand and navigate your site with ease, but also so the search engines index your site with high traffic search terms.

For example, if you have a site about horse breeding, you would want a menu and set of pages for different kinds of horses, another menu and separate set for tips for keeping a healthy horse, etc. Doing this in a time organized CMS wouldn’t make sense. You’d have everything in the form of dated posts, and you would need new tips on a regular basis.

The CMS one should use for this type of site is Drupal rather than Wordpress. Drupal allows the webmaster to easily create and rearrange menus, add content, make menu trees, insert stories (articles), and make an organizational layout that users would appreciate.

This is a website using Drupal: Ecademy.
My site (this one) uses Wordpress.

You would go to my homepage when you want to see the most recent posts I wrote. But for a site like Ecademy you could easily spend a few minutes surfing around the site to see what is has, and you might go back to the homepage to check out the featured articles, or any of the other information offered. Because of this type of layout, Ecademy gets more page views, and also more ad impressions in places where people are likely to click.

In short, they are both great but different products. Use Wordpress when you want to make a blog or time organized site. But, if you are doing a site covering many different categories and providing reference type of information, Drupal is a far better choice.

Wordpress strengths vs Drupal: More templates, more plugins, easier to use, easier to customize, more widely used and supported.

Drupal strengths vs Wordpress: Admin control panel much more powerful, organization options more advanced, still very widely supported. Drupal has a content revision tool that lets you switch back to older versions of pages. Some call Drupal more of a CMF (content management framework) with a out-of-box CMS.

Both of them: Open source, use PHP & MySQL, SEO friendly, allow plugins, lots of support information available.

Note: This recommendation is for people not intending to do a major programming overhaul of the CMS (either because they don’t want to or don’t know how.) Both CMS’s can be used for both types of organization and are fully customizable, but since the vast majority of users will not do major programming changes, I chose to evaluate them on the ‘out-of-box’ version.

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Filed under: CMS, Wordpress, Drupal

Building Blog Exposure

Posted on February 13th, 2007 by Ian M

This post is only my second post in my new blog. I need more exposure and today when reading John Chow’s blog, I remembered a great way to do it from a post I read from his blog before. This is a great way to get a link and give deserved props to a great blogger at the same time.

John Chow has an offer where if you review his blog, you get a link back to your own in a post. This is a great idea for him to build new readers and links, but he also gives back to his readers with the opportunity to get a great link and be featured in one of his posts.

My History with John Chow’s Blog

Unfortunately I don’t remember what originally brought me to the blog, or which article I read first, but the posts that really got me into the blog and made me subscribe was the financial review of the blog, with numbers on how well he was doing with blog income.

I think this was the first one I read: Making Money From A Blog - Week 4
The financial reviews are very insightful and there is a whole category full of them.

Since I first read the article and continued reading, I must have told at least twenty people about it. I do SEO for the company where I work and follow the industry closely. They interns helping me have to stay in tune as well, so I ask them to read John’s blog for standard reading to keep up. It got to the point where they read it and asked me questions about our work by reading his blog, before I even got a chance to read his new posts!

Beyond the work environment, John is an inspiration to me as someone who is ‘making it’ with the internet, and could theoretically live just off his blog income in many parts of the world. To me this is amazing, and I admire him for the progress he has made. His audience is so large, that each post he does he gets many, many comments.

In all honesty, I only read about 75% of the posts. My focus is mostly on the blogging and SEO industry side with an occasional technology post here and there. The blog though is mostly about the industry and so active that I check it more than a few times per day for updates through my blog folder in netvibes.

Check out the blog if you haven’t already, and John, thanks for the link opportunity and keep up the great posts!

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Filed under: Internet Marketing Industry, Blogs

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