What is PPC or Pay Per Click ?

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is an Internet advertisement opportunity used to drive traffic to a website. PPC has proven to be an effective search engine marketing tool with many savvy site owners and SEO professionals. PPC ads can deliver immediate traffic, but for a price. It’s important to understand how PPC works and how to use it to ensure you get the most for your money.

The mechanism behind Pay-Per-Click marketing is simple. Search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, auction off ad space on their SERPs. These ads are usually found at the top and/or the side of the SERPs and are not mingled with the organic search results.

In the graphic below, we see the Google search results for “send big files.” The PPC ads are located in the top yellow box, and in the side bar area to the right. These companies-- ShareFile.com, YouSendIt.com, and DropBox.com (top); and Box.com, Huddle.com, LiveDrive.com, SyncPlicity.com, Exavault.com, and Mail.com (right side)--have all set up a PPC

campaign with Google Adwords and set a bid amount to pay when someone clicks on one of these links. The first organic or free result on this page is from TransferBigFiles.com, which is located below the yellow box of PPC ads in the white, main body portion of the results page.

For example, let’s say ShareFile.com, as an advertiser, has bid $.10 per click for this ad. If 100 people click on the PPC ad, ShareFile.com will pay Google $10.00 for these clicks, whether or not these site visitors end up buying ShareFile services. PPC is an attractive marketing tool because it generates almost immediate results. It can also be very expensive and not very cost-effective if you do not know what you are doing. A PPC ad may bring a lot of traffic, but that traffic may not be converted into profits. In order to make the most of PPC marketing, advertisers need to take a targeted approach and monitor results carefully. One of the best features of PPC campaigns is that they are very flexible. Advertisers can adjust or eliminate their PPC ads quickly if the ads are not producing the desired return on investment.

PPC is a great way for sites to gain instant traffic to their sites by becoming immediately visible for certain keywords. If a site owner has a new product or service, PPC can get the word out quickly and deliver visitors to a new site, but PPC should never replace good SEO. SEO efforts are long-lasting, while PPC lasts only as long as a campaign is actively running.

Also keep in mind that 80% of searchers still prefer to click on organic results (the ones in the white, main body in the graphic), rather than on PPC ads, so solid SEO practices will prove very beneficial in the long-term once pages are indexed and begin to rank higher on the SERPs.

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How to Recover from Bad SEO ?

The quest for good search rankings can sometimes steer good websites down the wrong path. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of inconsistency in the SEO industry over the last decade. While there are many excellent SEO professionals out there, there are also plenty who are either incompetent, willfully unscrupulous, or dumb enough to believe that the worn-out, black-hat tactics of the past are still helpful to rankings today. If a website falls victim to bad SEO, it can damage search rankings or could possibly get a site banned from SERPs completely. Luckily, it is possible to recover from bad SEO if the problems can be identified and then rectified.

Damaging SEO, sometimes referred to as “black-hat” SEO, can come in numerous forms and is often difficult for site owners to detect. Initially, the bad SEO techniques may seem effective, by temporarily improving search rankings. However, eventually the search engines will discover the cause of the artificially quick and high rankings and will change the ranking of the site with a penalty. The site will remain penalized indefinitely if nothing is done to correct the problem.

Unfortunately, the search engines won’t tell you what was detected as being wrong or incorrect on your site. Often your only indication of a penalty is a drastic drop in search rankings. If this occurs you should quickly comb through the site yourself, or with the help of a reputable SEO expert, to discover the nature of the infraction. Look for common black-hat SEO methods like cloaking, hidden text, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, doorway pages, redirect pages, and linking to bad neighbors, unrelated sites, or banned sites.

Once you locate the bad SEO practices, you must remove or fix them. Unfortunately, this can take several months to achieve. Removing bad links, for example, can be easier said than done. Ultimately, you may have to cut the offensive pages out of your site completely or redirect the site to a new domain to completely rid yourself of bad SEO practices. Once you have successfully addressed the site problems, you should see an improvement in the rankings over time. If that doesn’t happen, you may need to appeal directly to the search engines and request reconsideration.

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