Articles
Search Engine Marketing Basics
By Michael Parker
Most businesses mistakenly assume that a website rich in design and intuitive is enough to send customers flocking with wallets in hand. Sure, having a great-looking, easy-to-navigate site is crucial but unless you're a small business sustained by word-of-mouth dollars you'll need to implement ways to "drive" those eager shoppers to your site.
One of today’s most effective tools for “driving” or directing customers to a company’s website is Search Engine Marketing. You’ve probably heard the terms search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing, just two of the components that make up Search Engine Marketing. Here is an overview of Search Engine Optimization, an effective traffic-building technique requiring careful planning and updating.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Choose your favorite search engine and search the word “leather.” What result do you get? Links to everything from shoes to sofas to saddles. That’s because each of these companies took the first step in Search Engine Optimization: understanding their customers and the words and phrases used when searching for their product. The next step is to embed these key words and phrases, also known as meta-tags, into their web pages “optimizing” them for the various search engines.
Registering with a search engine
Once your site has been properly optimized you’re ready to register it with search engines of your choice, with approximately 15 of them accounting for 85% of the total search traffic. It’s important never to use an automated search engine submission service that promises to register your site with hundreds, even thousands of search engines. Basically these services will spam the search engines with thousands of links per day—a sure-fire way of getting your site blacklisted by the major search engines.
Search Engine Maintenance
Now that you’re registered you’ll probably wait 1 to 2 months before your site appears in any results. That’s because you’re essentially placed in a queue waiting to be indexed by that engine, and with 1 million submissions per day you could find yourself near the end of a pretty long line. The fun begins when you start to appear in the search listings. This is the time to begin tracking where you are and what changes are necessary in order to move up in the listings to that coveted first page.
Pay-Per-Click Listings
Don’t want to wait to appear at the top of a search result? Then buy your way to the top. Read more here about how to side-step the relatively slow process of optimization by choosing a fee-based pay-per-click listing—a quick way to jump start your marketing efforts.
