What Is Search Engine Marketing
And Why You Should Care
There are eight elements that are required to get listed and ranked by major Search Engines and Directories, like Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Looksmart, Lycos, Netscape, All-The-Web, Ask Jeeves and many others.
Those elements are: Statistics, Content, Meta Tags, Submission, Reporting, Links, Tweaking and Patience.
Getting listed and ranked by major search engines does not happen by sheer luck. It takes some organic (on-going) effort. Web site owners who wish their sites to show up, when people are searching the engines uisng keyrwords/phrases, need to pay close attention to, and address the following major elements.
Statistics - The first step is to monitor your web site and see how much traffic you are currently getting and from what sources. How much traffic comes from Search Engines and which ones produce the most traffic is critical information. You can automate this process using tools such as Web Trends. Analyzing the traffic report can also tell you a lot about its. For example, if you find out that most people are "entering" to your home page and "exiting" from home page, that tells you that visitors do not find your site serious, or attractive, and you need to improve the look&feel of the site, or improve its usability.
Content - Your web pages should be content rich. This means that your pages must be well written and based on the keywords and phrases that best describe your company's products or services. As an example, if you make "copper jacketed clamps" and "heavy duty vises", you need to write a web page specifically for those phrases and other keywords/phrases related to your business.
Meta Tags - Meta tags are the HTML codes that go at the beginning of your web page that list your title, description, keywords/phrases, and other important elements. Not all Search Engines use Meta tag information. However, the ones that do will rank your web site high, if you use the proper tags.
Submission - Submission is the manual process that requires submitting your URLs to the Search Engines in which you want to be listed (indexed) in. After you submit, some Search Engines can take weeks or months before your web pages are indexed. You will want to submit every month or so until you see that your web pages are being listed. When you do get listed, your listing might start out low, but with on-going tweaking, your pages should rise up higher in the rankings.
Reporting - Keep a monthly record of your ranking for each keyword/phrase on all the Search Engines you submitted your site to. Using this report you will always know how well the pages are ranked. Over time, this report will help you determine if you need to make any further changes to your pages to improve their ranking.
Links - Creating links going from your site to other sites, links on your pages (linking pages within your site), and links from other Web sites that directly point back to your web pages are very important. The more specific (based on your keyword/phrase) these links are for a particular page, the higher ranking you will get on Search Engines like Google and others.
Tweaking - It might take a few months before your pages are indexed by the search engines. Once they are indexed, and positioned, it will be time to decide what changes are necessary in order to obtain an even higher ranking. Remember, it is an organic process. These changes might require modification to the page content, and tweaking the HTML code and Meta tags.
And finally, Patience - Getting your pages to rank high on the major Search Engines will take patience and persistence. The process of making your pages Search Engine friendly (optimized) is an organic process. Therefore, one has to stay with the process for as long as it takes. The results are well worth the effort.
Not only do you have just a few seconds to grab the attention of the web visitor, content developers must perform well within search engine searches so they are "found"when web surfers search on related keywords or phrases. In order to perform well, a website must have traffic. Decent traffic will result if a website ranks well in search engines, that is why strong placement in search engines for critical keywords and phrases is essential.
When struggling with search engine optimization just go back to the basics. What do search engines want? Search engines want to return search results, that are relevant and useful to the searcher. Webmasters can help search engines discern what keywords or phrases their site relates to.
Search Engine Optimization Dos
1. CSS - Cascading Style Sheets.
Use header tags and cascading style sheets in your website design. Many search engines value H1 and H2 tags more than others. The assumption is that header tags are used to highlight the most important items or themes that appear on a page. By using header tags, webmasters can bullet those keywords or phrases they deem to be most important. The CSS file will help your site load quickly and provide a consistent look and feel throughout the website.
2. Titles.
A website is the collection of webpages under a single domain. A webpage refers to a specific page within a website. Unique page titles throughout a website is important. Websites typically contain many webpages and using unique titles on webpages will help highlight different key phrases while uniting all the website content in a single theme.
3. Related Links.
Links from related or relevant sites are more important than generic links from unrelated websites. Links are seen as "votes" of quality content. Search engines weigh links from websites that contain related or similar content more importantly, than links from unrelated websites. Work to obtain relevant quality links from related or authority websites.
4. Anchor Text.
Vary anchor text. Use a variety of phrases to link to a site. Using different anchor text to link to a website is seen by search engines as "natural" linking. Search engines use the anchor text of a websites incoming link as part of their algorithm to determine a websites theme.
5. Copy.
A minimum of 200 words of copy is suggested for each web page. In order to spider a site a search engine must have sufficient copy to spider. Less does not necessarily mean more, when it comes to search engine ranking. In general try to keep copy "above the fold", so that visitors don't have to scroll. Copy above the fold is usually sufficient to determine the context of the webpage.
6. Fresh.
Keep it fresh. Search engines take notice of how frequently content is updated or added. Search engines spider websites that update content on a frequent basis at regular intervals. Add new content or webpages daily or weekly to increase a search engine spider's frequency.
7. Consistent.
Provide quality, consistent, fresh content. Consistent related content is critical to encouraging both visitors and search engines to return. Providing consistent quality content encourages links which will increase a websites popularity.
8. Themed.
Relate the contents of a website by a single theme. Uniting content using contextual words will help websites rank well for less critical but very targeted related keywords and phrases.
Search Engine Optimization Don'ts
1. Keyword Stuffing.
Don't stuff web pages with keywords that is similar to or the same as the webpages background color. Most search engines have ways to detect keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing will likely result in a search engine ban.
2. Cloaking.
Cloaking is when the website identifies the IP address of a search engine spider and feeds the spider content that it is not really on the page. Essentially the search engine sees optimized content that is not currently on the web page that it is spidered. It is difficult for search engines to detect cloaking, but if a site is banned or cloaking it is very difficult to convince a search engine to relist the content.
3. Don't Sacrifice Quality
Don't sacrifice quality for optimization. While search engine optimization is important, it is equally important that the content on a webpage should make sense. Placing well in search engines at the expense of a quality professional image with decent web copy, will not usually result in sales. It is a matter of striking a balance.
4. Spam.
Not much to be said about this one, don't spam. Don't spam search engines, don't conduct email spam campaigns, and don't spam forums. Being labeled a spammer is a hard reputation to shed.
A website is an important part of a business, search engine optimization is a business investment and requires attention and effort in order to succeed. Website creation is more than just pretty images and an attractive design. In order to "sell" your product or service your information, your site must be found. Therefore it is imperative that search engine content is optimized for search engine placement.
Lets start off with the Domain name. If you are planning on starting your own web site and have not chosen a domain name as of yet and want to get targeted traffic from the search engine marketing then consider a good keyword domain that is related to your web site topic. This simple technique has proven to work with search engine marketing for indexing (position) and overall keyword weighting. Now there are other factors to get considered by search engines like properly preparing your meta tags in the html. The meta tags that still hold importance to search are Title Tags, and Description Tags. Keyword tags do not hold the same importance like it use to. Another important factor is on page keywords, these are relevant keywords found on the body text of your website and choosing the proper keywords with relevance, keyword weighting (4-7%), as well as keyword proximity will be the difference between your website getting listed page 40 or page 2 or even page one in search engines.
Another important internet marketing puzzle piece for search engines is link building. This is the process were you get your website links listed on other important websites. There are different ways do accomplish this - reciprocal links and one way linking. Reciprocal linking involves you trading links with other webmasters, be sure that your website topic is relevant to link partners site. The other link building option is one way linking; this process involves you submitting your site to directories in the proper categories. Which is better? Research has shown that one way linking holds more importance to internet marketing In search engines that reciprocal. How many links should I drop? Never stop dropping links. You should continuously do link building it shows your site as importance to search engines. Remember when submitting links to have you text link contain important keywords relevant to your site.
The work involved for Search Engine Internet Marketing is extensive and to be honest hard if not done correctly. Organic search is a process and takes time so be patient and try to collect as much information as possible when entering this field before getting started.
Now there are internet marketing paid options that deliver traffic to your site faster than the initial process of search engine optimization. Don’t shy away from paid options because if you want to be successful online you really should consider FREE and PAID internet marketing for you internet business website. Some paid options include PPC or paid per click. This process is very fast way to get targeted traffic to your website by bidding on PPC keyword text ad placement in search engines. The more you are willing to bid the higher your placement will be in search engines. This option can run you a few dollars a month to a hundred dollars a month or even a few thousand a month depending on what you are selling and marketing and the size of your internet marketing budget. If your PPC campaign is not done correctly your budget be gone before you can blink so be sure to research this option before you jump in.
Another paid option, which has taken the internet by storm, is Million Pixel Home Page internet marketing. These NEW search engines marketing explosion is returning high amounts of traffic for a fraction of the total cost of PPC. Reports are showing great click through rates, increase in sales as well as overall increase in website for those sites that are participating. The cost is affordable and is a one-time payment in which the Million Pixel Home Page webmasters keep your website link on line for at least 3 years. This type of internet marketing will pay for itself time and time again. These Million Pixel Pages create traffic by creating buzz with unique SEM techniques that get visitors in and visiting your site and besides people seem to love them. It has been proven and it really works.
Remember the lifeline to your websites is traffic, with out it you website will never be discovered and never succeed. The above options are proven methods you should consider. Research all option before jumping in, the more you know the better.