Search Engine Optimization, Advertising Methods & Income - DiUF

40 Pages·2012·1.46 MB·English

University Fribourg

Switzerland

Department of Informatics
Information Systems

E-Business

Search Engine Optimization, Advertising
Methods & Income Sources
Seminar Thesis
Author:
Manuel Anthamatten
Wierystrasse 48
3902 Brig-Glis
Matriculation number: 10-212-512
[email protected]

Background:
Seminar Thesis for a Bachelor in
Business Management

Examiner:
Prof. Andreas Meier

Supervisor:
Luis Terán

Date:
Brig-Glis, 5. July. 2012
Management Summary
Since the most people enter the world wide web through a search engine, search engines were getting
more and more powerful. But the criteria used by the search engines to evaluate websites are not
public. Therefore a lot of people are dealing with the question of search engine optimization.
Getting more and more important is also online advertisement, because the time people spend online is
extremely increasing. One of the most growing advertising methods is probably social media, but a lot
of enterprises are still missing out on that opportunity.
The website "www.lernenmitspass.org" is a little project, with which the thesis will explain three
different advertisement methods and show some results with Google Analytics.
The thesis will also show some different income sources and will explain especially affiliate marketing
in more detail.
Keywords
 E-Business
 Search engine optimization
 Advertising methods
 Income sources
 Keywords
 Social media
 AdWords
 Facebook ads
 Google Analytics
 Affiliate marketing

i
Table of Content

Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................... i
Table of Content .................................................................................................................................... ii
List of Tables and Figures ................................................................................................................... iv
List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................. v
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Background and Motivation ....................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Problem Statement ...................................................................................................................... 1
1.3 Research Questions ..................................................................................................................... 2
2. Search Engine Optimization ............................................................................................................. 3
2.1 How Search Engines work .......................................................................................................... 3
2.1.1 Components of a Search Engine ............................................................................................. 3
2.1.2 Information Retrieval ............................................................................................................. 4
2.2 Keywords ...................................................................................................................................... 4
2.2.1 What are Keywords? .............................................................................................................. 4
2.2.2 Google's Keyword Tool ........................................................................................................... 6
2.3 Why Search Engine Optimization? ........................................................................................... 8
2.4 How to optimize a Website ......................................................................................................... 9
2.4.1 Content ................................................................................................................................... 9
2.4.2 Document-Length ................................................................................................................. 10
2.4.3 Site Structure ........................................................................................................................ 10
2.4.4 Link Structure ....................................................................................................................... 11
2.4.5 Images & JavaScript .............................................................................................................. 11
2.4.6 Metadata .............................................................................................................................. 11
2.4.7 Click Popularity ..................................................................................................................... 12
2.4.8 Common Mistakes ................................................................................................................ 13
3. Description of my Website .............................................................................................................. 14
3.1 Concept, Goals and Expectations ............................................................................................. 14
3.2 Search Engine Optimization on my Website .......................................................................... 17
4. Comparison of Advertising Methods on the Internet .................................................................. 18
4.1 Social Media - A Facebook Business Site ................................................................................ 18
4.2 Google AdWords ....................................................................................................................... 20
4.3 Facebook Ads ............................................................................................................................. 22
4.4 Google Analytics ........................................................................................................................ 24

ii
5. Affiliate Marketing .......................................................................................................................... 28
5.1 What is Affiliate Marketing? .................................................................................................... 28
5.2 How does Affiliate Marketing work? ...................................................................................... 28
5.3 Criteria for the Selection of Partner Programs ...................................................................... 28
6. What are possible Income Sources for an E-Business.................................................................. 30
6.1 Affiliate-Programs ..................................................................................................................... 30
6.2 Google AdSense ......................................................................................................................... 30
6.3 Digital Products ......................................................................................................................... 30
6.4 Services ....................................................................................................................................... 31
6.5 Online-Shop ............................................................................................................................... 31
7. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 32
Literature ............................................................................................................................................. 33
Internet Sources ................................................................................................................................... 34

iii
List of Tables and Figures
Figure 1: Google's Keyword Tool ........................................................................................................... 6
Figure 2: Results of the Keyword Research ............................................................................................ 7
Figure 3: Organic Ranking Visibility ...................................................................................................... 8
Figure 4: CTPM-Concept ...................................................................................................................... 14
Figure 5: Monthly Traffic Statistics ...................................................................................................... 16
Figure 6: Front page of the Facebook Business Site "Coca Cola" ........................................................ 18
Figure 7: Front page of the Facebook Business Site "Lernen mit Spass" ............................................. 19
Figure 8: Statistics of the Facebook Business Site "Lernen mit Spass" ................................................ 19
Figure 9: Google Results Page .............................................................................................................. 20
Figure 10: Facebook Ads: Targeting ..................................................................................................... 23
Figure 11: Google Analytics Overview ................................................................................................. 25
Figure 12: Google Analytics Traffic Sources ........................................................................................ 26
Figure 13: Google Analytics Traffic Sources (period of campaigns).................................................... 26
Figure 14: Visitors Flow ........................................................................................................................ 27

Table 1: Traffic Statistics ...................................................................................................................... 15
Table 2: Google Adwords Campaign .................................................................................................... 21
Table 3: Adwords Keywords ................................................................................................................. 22
Table 4: Results - Facebook Ads ........................................................................................................... 23

iv
List of Abbreviations
Ad Advertisement
CD Compact Disc
CTR Click Through Rate
E-Business Electronic Business
IR Information Retrieval
SBI! Site Build It!
SEO Search Engine Optimization
SERP Search Engine Results Page
URL Uniform Resource Locator
WWW World Wide Web

v
1. Introduction
1.1 Background and Motivation
More and more individuals are trying to earn money on the internet. You can find tons of information
on how to do it. Google "how to make money on the internet" and you will get 1,470,000,000 results!
You'll come across terms such as: Keywords, Keyword-Research, Affiliate Marketing, Click-Through-
Rate, Google AdSense, Search Engine Optimization, and much more.
What is behind all those terms? A lot of people don't even know any more! So what is it all about?
1.2 Problem Statement
For a layperson the internet delivers way too much information about this topic and people don't know
anymore which information is relevant and which not. There are tons of programs or books out there
and a lot of them promise you that you can make a lot of money in no time. But building a successful
e-business takes time and you need to offer real value!
An e-business differs from a physical business in a lot of ways. Even people who are good
businessmen in the "real world" might not understand anything about an e-business. It starts with the
way people find you. For example: When you have a physical business, people can see you when they
are shopping or when they are on their way home from work, but if you have an e-business people
don't just bump into you! In addition to that, online-marketing offers a lot of new facilities, which
don't exist in offline-marketing. In the internet, everything is about information. If people are, for
example, looking for a good science-fiction book, and you have good information about science-
fiction books, they are going to land on your site. So people find your information and not your
business if you don't have a famous brand. That's a big difference! So delivering high-valuable
information is by far the cheapest way to get people into your e-business.
And that is why search engines play such an important role. But the thesis will also show some other
possibilities, how you can get people into your e-business.

1
1.3 Research Questions
The following questions will be answered in the following Thesis:
1) How to optimize the content of a website for search engines?
a. Relevance: Search engines are very powerful and it is important for every e-business
to get good rankings.
b. Method: Argumentative-deductive analysis
2) How to get more visitors?
a. Relevance: Google and Facebook offer different tools to promote for your website.
But before starting it is important to make sure if it is worth the money and which tool
is best for you.
b. Method: Case study with the website www.lernenmitspass.org
3) What are possible income sources?
a. Relevance: For an e-business it is also important not to have only one pillar. The
thesis wants to show different options of income sources, which can be used in
combination.
b. Method: Argumentative-deductive analysis

2
2. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization refers to all actions that are appropriate to achieve a better position in the
editorial search engine results page. [Lammanett 2006]
2.1 How Search Engines work
"A search engine is a web application designed to hunt for specific keywords and group them
according to relevance." [Clay / Esparza 2009]
To get a better understanding on how to optimize a website for search engines, it is helpful to first
understand how search engines actually work. The thesis doesn't want to go into any details of this, but
it wants to give a quick overview.
2.1.1 Components of a Search Engine
Every search engine consists of three major elements:
 Crawler
 Index
 Search Engine Software
A crawler is also called spider. To get into the search engines' results, a website first needs to be
"spidered". That means that a crawler visits the site to get information about it. A crawler doesn't see
the website like a human visitor though, which needs to be considered when you optimize a website
for search engines. [Alby / Karzauninkat 2007, p.21]
Everything the crawler finds goes into the second part, the index. The index is a huge collection of
data, which contains a copy of every webpage that was spidered. A crawler needs to visit the same
website over and over again, to notice possible changes and to update the index.
Then the search engine software tries to find the most relevant matches to a search and puts them into
a ranking. [Search Engine Watch 2010]
According to [Baeza-Yates / Ribeiro-Neto 2011, p.468] ranking is the hardest and most important
function search engines have to execute. There are two main challenges they have to face.
1. Evaluating the efficacy of a ranking
2. Identification of quality content in the web
Besides those two main challenges, a new challenge is to avoid web spam.

3
2.1.2 Information Retrieval
"Web search has its root in information retrieval (or IR for short); a field of study that helps the user
find needed information from a large collection of text documents." [Liu 2007, p.183]
Information retrieval is more complicated than data retrieval in databases, because data in databases
are ordered in relational tables, while the websites are unstructured. Another difference is, that
websites have hyperlinks, and those are really important for the ranking. [Liu 2007, p.183]
The information retrieval needs to work for different forms of queries like:
 Keyword queries
 Boolean queries
 Phrase queries
 Proximity queries
 Full document queries
 Natural language queries
While a keyword query is pretty simple, a natural language query can get very complex. [Liu 2007,
p.185]
One important goal of information retrieval research is to develop models, which optimize the rate of
relevant information for a search. [Leibniz Gemeinschaft 2012]
Due to technical restrictions, information retrieval systems can not analyze any type of file. This needs
to be considered, when doing a search engine optimization. [Bischopinck / Ceyp 2009, p.190]
2.2 Keywords
Keywords play an important role in search engine optimization. Therefore this thesis wants to explain
what keywords are, why they are so important and especially how you find the best keywords for your
website.
2.2.1 What are Keywords?
Almost everyone in the internet is looking for information. The search term people enter into a search
box is also called a keyword. [David Asen 2009, p.67]
But which meaning have keywords for the one who builds the website?
The main question is: "Which words would the target group choose, to find this content?"
[Bischopinck / Ceyp 2009, p.175]

4