Search Engine Marketing
by www.millionpixelsadvert.com
1. Before you start.
What is Search Engine Marketing?
The main goal of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is to improve the access of a user to the website by increasing the visibility of the website
in the internet.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
The purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to promote the website in search engine results to improve its position in natural
(organic or algorithmic) listings for popular keywords and to increase the number and quality of visitors to that website.
Major Search Engines:
- Google
- MSN
- HotBot
- AltaVista
Terminology
SERP - Search Engine Results Page.
PR - PageRank, a mathematical algorithm introduced by Google, which calculates the priority of every website on scale from 0-10
(0 is the lowest priority and 10 is the most popular and important website).
TPR (Toolbar PageRank) - PageRank displayed in a special toolbar installed in the internet browser.
RPR - Real PageRank.
AT - Anchor Text - text/phrase inside the a href="website address">anchor text
IBL - Inbound Links - number of links indicating the same url address.
OBL - Outbound Links - number of links indicating outside website addresses.
Index - collection of sites available in search engine results.
Link exchange - is used to higher the number of inbound links between sites.
Link popularity - Value received for a question: link:website address
Algorithm Update - Change in search engine algorithm responsible for search engine result position.
2. Make a good Marketing Plan.
Set your goals.
One of the most important things in search engine marketing is to set your goals based on available facts and data. You have to plan your strategy
fitting to your company/website profile, current internet situation and financial possibilities. Remember that the internet is a fast growing environment
that is changing constantly. You may have to change your plans or goals (or make new ones) to cope with the changing market and expectations of
your clients.
You can also make short and long distance plans. For example, the short distance plan can be: "To get 200 new e-mail addresses to my mailing list",
and the long distance plan can be: "To boost visibility and consciousness of a product/brand among the internet users".
To realize the goals you need some resources. Those can be financial resources or the time that you or your co-workers can spend on realization
of the promotional operations.
Search engine marketing can adopt different forms and your job is to choose the most effective and the most suitable combination of methods for
your company. Remember to diversify your marketing strategies, do not focus at only one aspect of marketing, always search for new ways of
increasing visibility of your site. Think how much could you loose if you concentrate on optimization in Google search engine only and your site was
deleted from index for spam strategies. No one would find your website. That is why it is so important to use different forms of internet marketing to avoid
such situations.
Keyword research.
Why is this stage so important? Because well selected keywords will bring visitors to your site. Bad keywords, or irrelevant keywords will push your
website down in the SERP. Quality over amount is the key.
Keyword attractiveness and its potential are essential in choosing your search engine campaign. Do not use keywords that are too general. Try to
find the niche keywords that will best reflect your company product or offer. Unfortunately it is getting harder and harder to get those words as the
market grows and the most common words are already in use by many websites.
First of all do a brainstorm with your co-workers, family or friends and write down as many keywords describing your business as you can.
The best group of people to do a brainstorm are laics, not knowing the subject, and experts analyzing the results. Do not worry if your keywords are
silly or too bold. Try to encourage people to create new ideas and keywords. Never say that: "It is stupid, It will never work, That is silly, It is impossible,
You do not know what you are talking about". After the brainstorm take the results, prioritize them and leave only 15-20 the most important and
relevant keywords to your business.
The next step is to go online and search for those 15-20 keywords in all major search engines. Note down how many results you get for each one,
take a look at some of the websites to see your competition and compare your site with theirs. It will give you some idea on how your rivalry are doing
and what keywords did they use to promote their business (to see the keywords used on site use View/Source in Internet Explorer and hit Ctrl+U in
Mozilla Firefox. Now search for meta name=”keywords”
content=”those are the keywords You are looking for").
Now try to combine those 15-20 keywords to create phrases containing 2-4 words. Try not to exceed that number as most people use 1-4 keywords
when using search engines. Most people use 2 keyword phrases - 49% (year 2004), 1 keyword is used by 39%, 3 keywords by 9% and 4 keywords
only by 3% of users
(from iProspect Natural SEO Keyword Length Study).
If you can find a combination of keywords that are likely to be searched for and at the same time do not return many results that means you have
found "power combinations". Note them carefully. You may also want to re-prioritize your top 15-20 list.
You have finished. You have a list of 15-20 keywords most unique and relevant to your business. You may shorten that list to top 10 phrases to
make it even more "powerful".
However do not forget that this is not all. Test both, before you start and also after that. Try to search for new powerful words and keep on optimizing
that list even if your website is online for couple of years.
Domain name - that's all You've got.
Many people think that the site with keywords in domain name will get better search results or that domain name is the most important keyword.
That is not true. Many think that when you are looking for shoes on the internet you will type shoes.com. The time when it took place is gone. It is
most likely that you will type or search for the name of a brand that you are interested in. When you think about it, what domain names can you
remember? Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft? See the point? It is not the case of keywords in the domain name, it is the case of brand that stands
behind the domain. When you want to choose a domain name for your business do not get stuck in the keyword thinking. However note that:
people remember domain, which name is good, catches ear, is easy to pronounce and easy to write. You can say that a domain name without a
brand behind it is not worth anything. But when you develop and establish a brand your domain is all you've got.
3. Optimization.
Title
This is the most important tag in head section of your webpage. Title is the element of your site that is shown
directly on SERP and that is what most people read before they enter a website. That is why it should be short, suggestive, intriguing, unique and
should include keywords that the site is optimizing for. The worst thing you can do is to put in title section: "This is my super website" as this does
not include any potential keywords that can be searched for. You should remember that the search engine spiders prioritize better words that are
closer to the beginning of HTML document. This tag should consist of 5-10 words and not more than 75 characters.
Meta tags.
Meta tags are only visible for search engines and have different functions. Tags related with web optimization are the keywords and description.
META KEYWORDS
<META
name="keywords" content="keywords"/> This is the first place where spam was placed and that is why for couple of years now
its meaning is insignificant. Nevertheless you should spend some time writing the keywords, separated with a comma as some smaller search engines
and directories still use this tag to collect data about website. Usually this tag is treated as text on page. It should not be too long, it should include
the keywords and remember not to repeat the keywords.
META DESCRIPTION
<META
name="description" content="Website description."/> One of a few meta tags still in use that is important in web optimization.
It should include short description of a website using the keywords. This tag is shown usually as a description of a website so it should encourage
and invite users to visit your website.
META ROBOTS
<META
name="robots" content="index, follow"/> This tag gives an instructions to search engine spiders on how to index a site.
Using special parameters will cause that the page will be fully indexed (index), will not be indexed at all (noindex), spiders will visit all outbound links
and index them all (follow), will not index any site from the link inside the document (nofollow).
Heading tags.
h1-h6 Numbers from 1-6 define the size of the font. Number 1 is the biggest size and should be used only once
on a site, while numbers 2-6 are smaller and can be used many times. Text inside this tag should not be too long, should include keywords, however
not too many and should have a meaning.
Alt text.
img
src="image.gif" alt="keyword"
It is quite important to put alt text inside img tags. As search engine spiders cannot identify images
alt text informs them what image is about. It is also used by web browsers for blind people, so it improves usability of a website.
Anchor text.
a href="http://mywebsite.com" >keywords Search engines are mostly interested in words located inside the link description.
It should be a short description of a document/website it is linking to and should contain the keywords.
Sitemap.
Search engines love sitemaps, so you should put some effort in making one. Sitemap is a sort of an index of all pages on your website typically
organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps web spiders to reach all sites and it also helps the visitors.
Adding Your site to search engines.
When you are happy with your optimized website it is time to add it to search engines. It is very easy as most search engines offer special forms of
adding your site to their indexes. The other way is to add a link to your website on a site that has been already indexed by search engines and wait
for the web spider to visit your site. You can also use free submission services to do the job for you. Just search the net and I am sure you will get many free search engine submission services.
4. Analyze the results.
When you set up a website with unique content, well optimized for niche words, with nice graphics and user-friendly layout you would certainly like
to see the results of your hard work. That is great advantage of SEM comparing with other forms of marketing. You can measure the effectiveness of
your internet campaigns. Think of Search Engine Marketing as an investment rather than necessary expenses.
Site statistics.
Every respective hosting provider adds to the service some sort of statistics based on the server logs (most common are Webalizer and Awstats).
Every visitor leaves a mark such as IP number, number of minutes spend on site, web browser type, OS type etc. You can also see what keywords or
phrases were used in each search engine that led the internet user to your website. It is very important to check the statistics frequently because it
gives you details on how accurate are the keywords that you are using. If you do not get much traffic from the search engines or you want to get even
more visitors you should spend more time on keyword research or content writing. To improve the accuracy and number of statistics you can use other
free or paid analytic tools. One of the best free tools on the market for website analyzing is Google Analytics. Plenty of options and very intuitive menu
makes it a perfect tool for webmasters.
5. Resources.
Here are some interesting and helpful sites where you can find articles and tools that will help you widen your knowledge about Search Engine
Marketing and Search Engine Optimization methods (in no particular order).
www.linkvendor.com
www.sloganizer.net/en/
www.webconfs.com
www.searchenginewatch.com
www.seochat.com
www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html
This article is just a small part of what search engine marketing is about. Its purpose is to point out the most important steps in optimizing a website.
To get good search engine results you need to modify and plan your internet campaigns continuously. Do not forget about it and stay up to date with
this fast growing and changing market.
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internet marketing strategies that will bring many new visitors to your site. Advertise your site with pixels using millionpixelsadvert.com