Are Google Services Worth Paying For? Search Optimization will help you rank more organically.

Paying for Google services to help you rank at the top of a search engine is not necessary.  There is an easier (and cheaper) way to get traffic, and that is by creating quality content.  Using inbound marketing, which was discussed in my last blog post here. This will draw people in organically without the use of Google services. The antiquated thought that “website optimization” means ranking at the top of a search engine no longer holds water.  Optimizing a website is much more than that, ranking is only a small piece of the puzzle. 

The first way to optimize your website would be to have a goal in mind for what you'd like to accomplish with your site, and the second would be to make it easy to understand and easy to have the Googlebot crawl. The Googlebot will assist in searching your page for its purpose and help rank when a user searches on Google. We will be able to get more traffic through website optimization. There are a few ways to do this:

Types of Website Optimization

• Search engine ranking
• User experience
• Lead conversion
• Customer acquisition
• Customer Delight

(These relate back to the Inbound Methodology.)

We will optimize our website by making it more friendly for both searchers and search engines. The key is to focus on the searchers. The searchers will pay for your product or service, without the searchers we serve no purpose. The search engines are there to assist the searchers to find us.

Searchers	Search Engines
Searchers are people. They buy your product or services. They’re searching to accomplish something, know something or to navigate to something.	Search engines crawl content to understand the purpose. Googlebot is Google’s spider.  But there are people too. They index content based on the perceived purpose for the content. Uses lots of ranking factors in indexing.  (Over 200!!!)

*Remember* your website must be easy to crawl and understand. Ease of understanding is key to attracting visitors and having them stay. There are 3 ways to ensure the visitor's experience is a pleasant one: have a great design, quality content, and format the content well. Design will make certain the user experience is satisfying. Content overall will attract visitors that are searching for your page and will create hits organically. How the content is formatted is also important. Subheadings, font styles, colors, and other various content formatting is another way to create an exceptional experience.

Here is a great example of website optimization. Design, quality content, and the content is also formatted well.

So, I've done a lot of talking about "quality content," Google has put together a guideline that I will link here.