SEO – Self Help Search Engine Optimization

Inside Google labs, it’s hard to know what’s cooking. The latest one, though, has a whole lot of netizens buzzing — Custom Search Engine ( CSE), part of Google Co-Op, the google partnership programme.

Take a look at it for yourself at http://www.google.com/coop/cse/. Internet trend analysts believe Google is trying to improve the quality of search results for the specialists. Google will also get to collect user behaviour data more easily as this programme works only for those who register with it. A key factor behind CSE, according to a practitioner of Google AdWords, is the fact that Yahoo’s search engine marketing tool Panama is ready for launch, something that’s certainly worrying the company. He adds, “Google’s management is more bottomline driven than what it used to be in the past. Every product is made with the intention of making money for the company.” Adds Manish Vij, business head, Quasar Media, an Internet media firm, “It’s not the most relevant product from Google, but just a step to keep its publishers and happy and market share intact.”

Essentially, CSE lets you, the user, decide what sites should be included in the search. You can select from hundreds of URLs, a significant improvement over what other custom search engines like Yahoo! Search Builder and even Google’s Sitesearch offer currently, just one URL to search from. You have your own search index rather than relying on Google’s Page-rank algorithm to throw up the necessary results.

You can also customise the look and feel of the results page. The idea is that if you’re an expert in a particular area or field, you can set up an engine for others in your field to use. With the CSE, it’s likely that many hidden links and Word documents that weren’t always on the radar of the Google spider will now be available to a lot more users because these will start appearing higher in search results. It’s obvious that this has its advantages.

Consider realclimate.org, a website dealing with the science of climate change and one of the early adopters of the CSE. For this site, the built-in custom search engine will search only those pages that scientists would deem fit to be viewed by others in the field of climate change. This would ensure that quality information is available in a field where perhaps the best results wouldn’t make it to the first few pages. Similarly, healthcare and medicine are other fields where CSE has obvious benefits. CSE also becomes, in effect, surrogate search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO is like a tution class that makes a website smarter and apear higher in Google’s list of preferred pages. It is a tool whose practitioners are looked on with awe, SEO now becomes simpler and easier to execute, because more links indexed in the CSE will now show up in the regular Google search. Yet, for all of Google’s apparent altruism, it’s clearly yet another revenue generating stream.

Google’s ad inventory is limited to a certain extent by the number of search pages it throws up. The only way to increase this inventory is simply by increasing the number of search pages that wil be thrown up. In other words, Google has more pages to put their ads. This means they can make more money through their pay-per-click program, with more search results in which to plug their AdWords and more sites in which to plug their AdSense program.

For any business to succeed on internet or outside, it is important to understand the Return on Investment the owner is getting. It is generally the profit or turnover being made by them at the end of the day compare to the amount invested in the same. The rule applies to every aspect of our life also. When we go to college/school to study, we look for high marks which will assure us a good job in future. While talking about web portals, they also keep close watch on what their ROI is when investing & creating the site. This is because, every investment needs to yield results for it to be effective, else the approach needs to be changed.

Search Engine Marketing must take into account the two operational methods – using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click management system like google adwords or YPN. Search Engine Optimization will work better in the long run, whereas pay per click is mainly to draw specific bracket of traffic onto the site and this works only for a short time. All efforts taken by way of investment and links will go to waste if there is not much of traffic to your portal.

Pay per click works by having the user post as many ads on their page, or posting links on other pages or other websites. If a person surfing the net comes across these ppc ads, and clicks on them, the owner will get revenue based on the terms mentioned by the pay per click service provider. The ads placed need to be such a way that they draw attention to your page and keep the user captivated. User should stay on your website for long time. It is not that you are spending about $1 or $5 on the clicks and the person who comes over to your page and leaves, with no return. Sometimes even by running AdSense on your page, you might find the search engine throws up your page on the results page only if the ad is on the related page and nowhere else.

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