The purchasing of a visitor to your website or "click" from the search engines is called "pay-per-click" (PPC) advertising. All major search engines offer a PPC program where you can bid on the keywords you would like to have your website show up on the paid section of that search engine.

"Organic" search engine optimization (SEO) is achieved by optimizing the pages on your website and also increasing the overall popularity by gathering or paying for links to your website pages.  The more relevant links you can have to a page on your website the more likely you will rank well.

Below is a chart describing some of the characteristics of both organic SEO and PPC advertising:

Read more: Organice SEO vs. PPC

Written by Tina Johnson

If you have attempted to work on your own SEO campaign, you probably have realized how difficult it is to achieve a page one ranking on Google for competitive search terms.  You can go out and read the “how to” books, keep up on the great SEO sites out there such as SEOmoz & SEObook, you can even purchase some SEO tools to help manage your campaign but in the end  you will realize just how time consuming a SEO campaign really is.

If you are a business owner, chances are you are very busy; you may want to consider hiring a Denver SEO company to do the work for you. With so many SEO companies out there, you can't complain that you have no choice.

Choosing the right SEO company for you and your business is important not only for the success of your internet marketing campaign but to prevent any problems in the future.  The process is much easier if you yourself have a respectable knowledge of SEO and can easily decide if they promise you the stars in the sky or their goals are realistic but even if you are not quite familiar with SEO practices, here is a list of questions with some key points to look for when choosing a Denver SEO company:

• Do they promise to guarantee #1 ranking? If any company out there promises you a #1 ranking you should immediately be suspicious.  No one has the power to guarantee a top listing even for non competitive keywords.  Google even states no one can guarantee this spot.  There is a difference in being confident in obtaining a top 3 ranking and guaranteeing a #1 spot. 
• Get recommendation from friends, business partners, etc. There couldn’t be a better indication that a SEO company will be good to work with than a solid recommendation from a friend or business partner.  If they were happy with the results chances are you will too.  A lot of our clients come as referrals so we rely heavily on our customer’s satisfaction.

  Read more: Choosing The Right SEO Company

Written by: Isaac Merriman

Google is operated by computers that do nothing but visit sites and determine their importance based on a set of guidelines. Although the exact makeup of the guidelines Google uses to determine website importance are a trade secret, Google recommends making the site for human as opposed to robot consumption. Google robots search through all the text, trying to identify what the site is about. As a robot, Google is relatively predictable, and there are many ways you can modify your site to help your rankings.

The first and often most powerful aspect Google considers is your domain name. A company selling vacuum cleaners will automatically receive a huge bonus for searches for “vacuum cleaners” if they are called vacuum-cleaners.com as opposed to localvac.com. One reason for this is because many internet users use search like the address bar. The address bar is where you are supposed to put “cnn.com”, but many people just type that into search, so the search engines have adjusted accordingly.

The title tag is what is displayed across the top of your browser’s banner when you are on a website. It is also what is displayed as the link on every search engine result. This is a very important, and usually short text string that should be optimized both for viewers of search results and for the search engine bots. Google’s title page just says “Google” but yours should be a brief description of your company including your most sought after keywords.

Google also searches parts of the site that are invisible except in code. These invisible codes are called meta tags and meta descriptions. The meta tags are a list of keywords you as a site owner list as being relevant to your site. Because of meta tag abuse by unscrupulous internet marketers, Google claims to no longer look at this portion of the site code. Other search engines still place weight on your meta tags. The meta description is a description of your site slightly longer than the title tag. The meta description is usually a few sentences. Google will pull a portion of either your meta tag or some on-site text do display below your title tag in the search results. Therefore the description should be a short, to the point description of your company that users would click on, and that includes some of your keywords.

Besides what you claim your site is about, your site’s actual content is analyzed by Google bots to determine what your site is about. Google looks for relevant keywords in the page text. The frequency that those words appear on the page text is called keyword density,  and is another prime way Google determines the site’s subject. To optimize for on-site text you want to have multiple instances of keywords that you think people looking for a company like yours will use to search.  Your site’s interior linking structure is also read by the search bots. You can manipulate your link structure to try and promote a particular page as most important, or you can try to optimize different pages for different search terms. The key criteria Google uses to evaluate internal links is by what text is used for the link. So as much link anchor text as possible should use keywords.