Netsuite SEO Search Engine Optimization Tools

The SEO Netsuite application is intended to be a test of mine to document the seo capabilities inside of the Netsuite Application Platform.

I have been in the SEO industry for over a decade now for a number of firms outside of NetSuite including many Forbes 100 company campaigns. My strategies are currently helping two companies to realize their Inc. 500 Fastest growing company status.  All of these sales are generated from organic seo. (Over 1200 first page rankings in google, yahoo, ask, etc.)

$2million / per month in SEO related sales in the first three years using these techniques.

How much is a first page ranking for all of your products worth for your firm ?? It should be in the millions of dollars. / day/week/year !!

Never underestimate the power of organic search engine optimization.

Natural search engine optimization is difficult and expensive. For example if you want your website to rank high for "life insurance" or "debt consolidation", it will cost you between $50,000 and $100,000 per year.

Fact:

About 60% of the top search engines' screen real estate is devoted to non-paid, "organic" listings - which means 60% of your search engine visibility depends on SEO, not PPC or other paid placement. On average, about 70% of clicks from search engines come from SEO, with big differences among the search engines. SEO clicks convert at about a 25% higher rate than PPC clicks (BusinessWeek, 5/06), while a 2005 Marketing Sherpa study showed that organic referrals convert at 4.2%, vs. 3.6% for PPC. Here again wide variations are to be expected among different industries and between B2B and B2C. PPC campaigns usually require nearly as much labor to set up as SEO requires, in addition to the click charges you pay after set up is complete. PPC requires ongoing management, whereas SEO, when done right, is done once and performs superbly in perpetuity. PPC prices are constantly increasing, often beyond positive ROI for your most important phrases, while SEO listings are free. Finally, PPC is increasingly beset by varieties of "click fraud."

PPC is usually the second most cost-effective form of web marketing, after SEO, though skilled management of trusted feeds to shopping comparison sites can achieve higher ROI than PPC does (see DISC's page on Trusted Feeds). Therefore, your first priority is to ensure that your site has optimum inclusion and rank within the non-paid, "organic" or "editorial" parts of Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOLsearch, and the other top search engines. Your second priority is PPC.

Explanation and Details

The top search engines do not want to cheat their users by providing only paid results. Search engines earn their trust, and hence their traffic and subsequent revenues, by attempting to provide objective information, and advertising is inherently biased. Some web searchers might seek out a company that pays for advertisement, in the belief that the most professional, reputable companies selling, say, diabetes testing kits or high-tech shipping cases should run ads online. However, many niche marketers and even established corporations do not employ an adequate paid-placement strategy. Eventually, searchers would discover this information deficit and move on to another search engine, like Google, that is more objective and informative and less advertising-based. Therefore, top search engines usually set aside paid results in "sponsored links" or other designated areas so customers don't feel that the information they get is provided solely on the basis of who bids the highest.

This means that non-paid listings are and will remain central, and the only way to prevail in those listings is through SEO.

A major reason that SEO should be your first priority is that it is more cost-effective than PPC. The labor costs of setting up and managing a PPC campaign are usually the same or even more than the labor costs of SEO, but then there are the continuous click charges you pay after set-up.

Another advantage of SEO over PPC is stability: PPC positions continuously change according to your competitors' bidding tactics, while SEO is much more stable (when done right). Contrary to popular belief (even among some SEM firms), the linguistic parts of the top search engines' ranking algorithms have not changed much in the last few years, and they will not change in ways that substantially affect optimum SEO tactics. Non-linguistic and off-page components of the algorithms, such as the quantity and quality of incoming links, do change, but these parts are not influenced by SEO, and they are applied to ranks that are first determined (within nano-seconds) by the on-page language. Numerous case histories (some published by DISC) show that SEO done right endures for years without ongoing tweaking - or the need for retainer fees. (See our SEO Myths page for more about this topic.) PPC, on the other hand, requires ongoing management to ensure that your advertisements are as prominent as positive ROI allows, especially if your business is in a competitive field that has gravitated to PPC.

Finally, "Click Fraud" is a growing problem that further reduces PPC's ROI relative to SEO. Click fraud is defined (per DISC's expert friend and former employee, Jessie Stricchiola) as "the practice of clicking on a text advertisement served by a search engine for the sole purpose of forcing the advertiser to pay for the click." (For a good overview of the problem, check out Jesse's article at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3387581; she has been quoted in countless articles.) Using manual clicks or, more damaging, software that simulates human clicks from different IP addresses around the world, your competitors can rapidly rack up your click charges. Also, web publishers that display your PPC ads through contextual advertising can earn revenue by implementing fraudulent clicks. Google and Yahoo can detect some of this fraud, and increasingly they are crediting PPC advertisers for suspected fraud, but there are ways to evade this detection.

Click fraud is a major threat to the whole search engine industry, as well as to individual advertisers. Fortunately, SEO is immune to this threat - because the absence of click charges eliminates any incentives or rewards for potential culprits.

For all the reasons described above, SEO is your first priority; PPC is second.

When you use an effective SEO strategy. Not only does your main page rank high for search terms but all of the product pages, categories, information items, rss feeds, podcasts, videos, and content pages rank high. This broad strategy to "go for it all" is extremely effective. It pays handsomely to concentrate on products that have big margins. It only takes one good visitor buying a $100,000 piece of gear to make all your efforts to optimize each product pay off.

Pay per click advertising is effective but very small in comparison with organic listings.

I have decided to write start this blog to document what works inside of NetSuite with regards to common SEO best pracices. Along the way I will create tools to automate the processes that I find redundant or non existent in NetSuite. I am also creating a NSBOS application utlizing SuiteFlex, SuiteTalk, SuiteScripts and other useful tools inside of Netsuite for keyword research, anlaysis, PPC data, yahoo and google APIS and other SEO applications that I have found to be usefull.

Netsuite SEO Update #1:
Now two weeks into the project I am #1,2,10,11,12 in google for "seo netsuite" and I am #5,9,10,11,15 for "netsuite seo" combining some basic and more Web2.0 type techniques.

I am in the process of creating tools and instructional videos for safe, effective, search engine optimization techniques that work inside and outside of Netsuite but will effect your rankings in all of the search engines, for all of your products and information.