There’s no “quick hit” in getting good organic listings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). In the past year I have seen the value of organic over Pay Per Click (PPC) gradually rise to the point where good organic results eclipse the cost of PPC in certain areas.One example has one of our clients paying $3,000 a month on PPC whilst getting over 60% of their Google traffic from their organic listing.Does this mean reigning in some of the PPC spend? It certainly could, but the unfortunate truth in any competitive environment is sometimes you “have to be there” from a branding or positioning standpoint. No paying for sponsored placing isn’t an option.As searchers become more sophisticated in their realization of the value of organic results over “sponsored” listings (often greater relevance) I expect this trend to continue and the value of good SEM and SEO for better organic ranking to increase along with it.

It used to be that the description and keywords meta tags ruled in SEO land - discussions would go on *for hours* about “the mystery tweak” in a pages’ keywords or description suddenly sent that site to #1 on Google.If only it were that easy!I’ve heard rumblings and had many questions asking if these specific meta tags are still important and questioning their value to implement. My answer: Don’t believe anyone that says description and keywords meta tags are no longer relevant.While it’s true that search engines are getting more and more focused on other page and code criteria (especially Google that now grabs content from the page to use in it’s “description snippets” in organic listings) making these meta tags *LESS IMPORTANT* they are by no means irrelevant!It’s true that for Google - the big boy - well-written and formatted page content is more important (keywords tag is almost ignored!)Bottom line… description and keywords meta tags haven’t gone the way of the Dodo yet, they shouldn’t be ignored. Well-crafted and unique description and keywords meta for each page of your site is still a factor worthy of your time and efforts. 

Wikipedia says it best:”Search Engine Marketing, (SEM), is a form of  Internet Marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, SEM methods include: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion.Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings with the goal of obtaining better free search listings.I’d like to add and important component to this definition; Copy-writing. As the number of competing websites has grown, copy-writing is an important and differentiating factor the allows search engines to better understand page content for relevancy and positioning in search engine results pages.

No matter how many posts you’ll see here… keep coming back to this one.Nothing… NOTHING is more important to search engines than good, solid, unique content. Short term you *may* get good search engine placement with unique place holder copy or abbreviated subject matter.To maintain good positioning you will need to create unique content specifically relevant to subject matter of interest to search engine users.