Search marketing is the process of generating traffic and gaining visibility from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo through paid and unpaid strategies.
This includes generating traffic through organic or free listings as well as buying traffic through paid search listings on ad networks like Google AdWords.
This process was originally called “search engine marketing,” the shorter phrase “search marketing” is now often used as a term to cover search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) which is used to describe paid search activities.
Before we dive into how you can use search marketing for your business I want to share a little bit of search engine history with you so you can get a better understanding of how they work.
Not too long ago, if a person needed information they were forced to go to the local library and spend hours digging through shelves of books.
Nowadays finding information is easier than ever before and we have search engines to thank for that.
Now when someone needs information all they have to do is type in a query online and a list of options appear for them to explore.
In 1990 the very first search engine was created by students at McGill University in Montreal.
The search engine was called Archie and it was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files.
FTPs (short for File Transfer Protocol) are used to transfer data from one computer to another over the internet, or through a network that supports TCP/IP protocol.
In its early days Archie contacted a list of FTP archives approximately once a month with a request for a listing.
Once Archie received a listing it was stored in local files and could only be searched using a UNIX grep command.
Today, search engines index much faster and match a user’s keyword query with a list of potential websites that might have the information the users is looking for instantly, which make them a very powerful tool for online marketers.
The typical search engine provides ten potential hits per page. The average internet user never looks farther than the second page the search engine provides.
As marketers it is important to constantly find and use new methods of search engine optimization in order to be ranked high by the search engines.
Those are the types of topics we will be covering in this report.
Search marketing can be very confusing especially when you are just getting started.
People who say that they understand it usually have a general idea of what is going on, but often can’t give you any real details about it.
As you learn the ropes you will hear a lot of buzz words to get you excited about something that you really don’t understand.
So how do you know what is right and what isn’t? The answer to these questions is a lot of research, time and testing.
It isn’t something that you can understand in one day.
Getting to the top of the search engine results can be very beneficial and the best way to do that is to make sure that you understand how to market your business, and how search engine marketing can play a role.
Too many website owners feel that once they submit their page to a search engine they are guaranteed success. That’s generally not the case.
Simply submitting your web page to a search engine is not always enough to get any hits.
Most web pages require search engine optimization to become truly successful.
Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines.
The goal of search engine optimization is to have your website ranked in the top ten internet search hits that appear on the first page.
Why is it important to be on the first page? It’s important because the average internet user doesn’t click on any of the sites listed on the second or third page.
Out of sight, out of mind.
One website owner reported a two hundred and ten percent increase on her e-commerce site when she had her webpage redesigned for optimal search engine optimization.
You would think that the prospect of a two hundred and ten percent increase in sales would be all the incentive a web developer would need to redesign their site.
That isn’t always the case. There are a variety of reasons people avoid recreating their websites.
Some people believe that search engine optimization is too difficult to understand. The reality is that search engine optimization is fairly simple.
All it takes is a little research.
Other people feel that there are simply too many things to learn before they will be ready to optimize their website. Search engine optimization is just like anything else.
When you first start out you know nothing.
With some homework and a bit of trial and error and you will know exactly what it takes to make your webpage popular with the web crawlers.
Some people believe that search engine optimization will take up lots of their precious time.
People with this particular fear should remember that old adage about time and money.
If time spent optimizing your website leads to an increase in sales isn’t it time well spent?
Besides search engine optimization is easy, once you have the hang of it won’t add much to the time you would already have to devote to updating your website.
You do not have to submit to gobs of search engines to reap the rewards of search engine optimization.
If you have a large site you shouldn’t worry about spending lots of time optimizing it and running the risk of never finishing the process.
If you have a large website just take things one step at a time. Focus on optimizing one page per day.
Start with your most important pages and then concentrate on the irrelevant pages.
By using this one page a day method you won’t run the risk of sitting at your computer until your eyeballs fall out of your head.
It might take some time and some trial and error to optimize your website but you will consider it time well spent when you see an increase in the amount of traffic, the increase in traffic should lead to more sales.
Search marketing is a set of marketing methods used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages.
Types of search engine marketing include; search engine optimization, pay per click, paid inclusion, and social media optimization.
Search engine marketing differs from search engine optimization which is the art and science of making web pages attractive to internet search engines.
Non-profit organizations, universities, political parties, and the government can all benefit from search engine marketing.
Businesses that sell products and/or services online can use search engine marketing to help improve their sales figures.
Some of the goals of search engine marketing are to develop a brand, generate media coverage, and enhancing a reputation, and to drive business to a physical location.
If you do not feel confident enough to try your own search engine marketing there are several companies that will be able to help you out for a price.
If you decide to go with a search engine marketing company take your time and shop around, find a company that really suits your own businesses search engine marketing needs.
Stay away from companies that promise top rankings.
Most companies that promise top ranking are more interested in your money than they are keeping your business.
Quite often this type of company will charge you top dollar, spend a few days making sure your website has a few basic requirements and that is the last you hear from them.
This type of search engine marketing company is not really interested in repeat customers.
Tread carefully around companies that promise first page rankings on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Make sure these companies are talking about sponsored listings and not just natural listings.
Companies that are only after natural listings traditionally charge a large monthly fee, using a small portion of the money on sponsored listings, and pocketing the remainder.
The false promise most commonly used by shady search engine marketing companies is the money back guarantee.
Generally if you read the contract very carefully you will learn that these companies have a very strange idea of major search engine.
Companies that have a money back guarantee typically don’t deal with the search engine movers and shakers like Google and Yahoo, instead they use small obscure search engines that are hardly ever used.
The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) was created in 2003 to offer the public educational resources about search engine marketing and to also promote search engine marketing.
Currently it represents over 500 global search engine marketing companies.
The site offers their resources to the public for free as well as search engine marketing training courses for anyone who would like to expand their knowledge of search marketing.
Their objective is to teach search engine marketing strategies, techniques, and practices, to help you become successful, so you should definitely spend some time going through their resources.
Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages appear attractive to the search engines.
The better optimized a website is, the higher the ranking it will receive from a search engines web crawlers, the higher its ranking the more traffic your website will have, the more traffic your website has the more profit your website will generate.
The key is good internet search engine optimization.
Why is having a receiving a high ranking so important to the future success of your online business?
Studies have shown that consumers seldom look at websites that don’t rank a spot on the first two pages the search engines displays.
Websites that receive a ranking that places them on the third page (or any other pages after that) see a significantly lower amount of traffic at their websites than one that is ranked on the second page.
There is even a staggering difference between the first and second page. In the world of e-commerce ranking and strong search engine optimization is everything.
At first search engine optimization may feel like trying to rappel down the Grand Canyon, a huge scary world full of big words like web crawlers, PageRank, Meta tags, and algorithms.
You’ve never heard of any of these things.
A quick internet search of the word algorithm doesn’t help; all you got was a printout of strange symbols and numbers arranged in complex algebraic equations.
Algorithms really are every bit as complex as they look. Simply defined they are a finite set of carefully defined instructions.
Most, if not all, computer programs are designed with strict algorithms.
PageRank is simply the program Google designed to search, index, and rank its registered webpages. PageRank operates on a link analysis algorithm.
Web crawlers are tools search engines use to browse the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.
Meta tags are special HTML tags that provide information about a web page.
The reality of search engine optimization is that you can start to optimize your website without any knowledge at all of the technical stuff involved in search engine optimization.
Simply stated the very first step in designing a website that is going to be well ranked by the search engines is to create a content rich site.
What this means is that you must cram as much information about your product into your website as you possibly can.
The third step to search engine optimization is to fill your site with keywords that will attract the web crawler’s attention.
The final step in a wonderfully optimized website is to submit it to the search engine that will compliment it.
When it comes to title tags and search engine optimization there are a few question website owners typically ask. Does each individual web page need a different title?
Is there a maximum length for title tags?
The World Wide Web Consortium requires that every single HTML document must have a title element in the head section.
They also state that the title element should be used to identify each individual pages content.
The title tag plays four separate roles on the internet.
The first role the title tag fulfills is what librarians, other Web developers, and directory editors use to link to other websites.
A well written title tag is far more likely to get faster reviews than one that is not highly targeted to consumers.
A title tag is what is displayed on the visitor’s browser.
By displaying the title tag in the visitors browser the web user knows exactly where they are if they have to return to the site later on.
Internet Explorer typically tries to display the first ninety-five characters of the title tag.
Search engines display the title tag as the most important piece of information available to web searchers.
A good title tag should be able to clearly indicate the webpage’s contents to the web user. A clear title tag is more likely to be placed in the user’s favorites list.
The normal length for a good clear title tag is normally under sixty-five characters long.
When it comes to search engine optimization, the home page title is normally the first thing the web crawlers look at when they are ranking a webpage.
Your website is introduced by your homepage title.
TIP: It’s important to make sure that your title tag sounds credible.
Every single page of your website must have its very own unique title. A Meta tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a web page.
Meta tags do not affect the display of a webpage. Although Meta tags are placed directly into the HTML code, they are invisible to web users.
Search engines use Meta tags to help correctly categorize a page. Meta tags are a critical part of search engine optimization.
It is important to remember that Meta tags are not a magic solution to making your website a raging success.
The most valuable feature Meta tags offer to website owners is the ability to control (to a certain degree) how their web pages are described by the search engines.
Meta tags can also let website owners prevent having their website indexed at all.
Meta tag keywords are a way to provide extra test for web crawler based search engines to index.
While this is great in theory several of the major search engines have crawlers that ignore the HTML and focus entirely on the body of the webpage.
The terms web crawler, automatic indexers, bots, worms, web spiders, and web robots are programs or automated scripts with browse the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner.
The term web crawler is the most commonly used term.
Web crawlers are a tool used for search engine optimization.
Search engines use web crawlers to provide up to date data and information.
Web crawlers provide the requested information by creating copies of web pages that the search engine later processes.
Once the information has been processed the search engines indexes the pages and are able to quickly download the pages during a search.
The process of web crawling is a key factor in search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines.
Computer people call the process of using a web crawler to rank a website spidering.
Some search engines use web crawlers for maintenance tasks. Web crawlers can also be used for harvesting e-mail addresses.
The internet is a gaping ocean of information. In 2000, Lawrence and Giles manufactured a study that indicated the internet search engines have only indexed approximately sixteen percent of the Web.
Web crawlers are designed to only download a tiny amount of the available pages. A miniscule sample of what the internet has to offer.
Search engines use web crawlers because they can fetch and sort data faster than a human could ever hope to.
In an effort to maximize the download speed while decreasing the amount of times a webpage is repeated search engines use parallel web crawlers.
Parallel web crawlers require a policy for reassigning new URLs. There are two ways to assign URLs.
A dynamic assignment is what happens when a web crawler assigns a new URL dynamically.
If there is a fixed rule stated from the beginning of the crawl that defines how to assign new URLs to the crawls it is called static assignment.
In order to operate at peak efficiency web crawlers have to have a highly optimized architecture.
URL nominalization is the process of modifying and standardizing a URL in a consistent manner. URL normalization is sometimes called URL canonicalization.
Web crawlers usually use URL normalization to avoid multiple crawling’s of a source.
In an attempt to attract the attention of web crawlers, and subsequently highly ranked, Web developer are constantly redesigning their websites.
Many Web developer rely on key word searches. Web crawlers look for the location of keywords, the amount of keywords, and links.
If you are in the process of creating a website try to avoid frames. Some search engines have web crawlers that cannot follow frames.
Another thing some search engine are unable to read are pages via CGI or database -delivery, if possible try creating static pages and save the database for updates.
Symbols in the URL can also confuse web crawlers.
You can have the best website in the world and if a web crawler can’t read it probably won’t get the recognition and ranking it deserves.
Many people ask what search marketing is and how can it pertain to their business?
As we know search marketing is the promotion of your website through search engines in order to obtain more traffic to your website.
This in turn generates more leads for potential sales within your business. A very important part of search engine marketing is pay per click (PPC) advertising.
This type of advertising can send targeted traffic to your website when used properly.
You can actually start receiving targeted visitors to your site within minutes, provided of course you have set up your PPC campaign correctly.
SEO on the other hand will minimally take hours, days and in some case three to six months before you will see results.
– Ensure your business website is registered with the major search engines:
Within today’s world, unbelievably more people spend more time on the internet as compared to those who do not use the internet.
The younger generation (ages 18 to 35) spends more time upon the internet as compared to other market groups.
No matter the market group, which you are targeting, you must ensure your business website can be found within the major search engines upon the internet.
Internet visitors utilize the search engines in searching for products, services and information.
If you do not have your business listed within the major search engines, you will be losing business or even worse go out of business.
– What can SEO do for my business website?
The most effective method of search engine marketing is search engine optimization.
SEO improves the quality as well as increasing the multitude of traffic to your business website through the major search engines.
The more often your business shows up within the major search engines, the more visitors you will receive to your internet site, which will in return generate more leads as well as sales for your business.
– What is the big deal about rankings with my business website and search engines?
You want your business to rank well within the search engine rankings.
Upon achieving good rankings, you will find that your business website will bring people in who are looking for particular services or products.
These are commonly titled “potential customers”.
– SEO is not a one-time deal
It requires a lot of time and effort to achieve results. It’s not a one-time thing, in order to be effective must be continually updated.
If you aren’t confident with your own SEO skills, I recommend hiring a reputable SEO technician.
This will allow you to focus on other matters pertaining to your business.
The days of merely adding, a Free Business Listing in your local, Google.com is over.
Where this can be an effective marketing strategy for local business, as well as aid you in ranking well within Google Maps, you still have the option of adding Google Coupons which appear within your Business Listing within Google Maps and YouTube video as well as images.
– The many advantages for Local Search
Ensure that you explore as well as implement a more broad Local Search Marketing strategy even if you only have one business website ranking upon Google for your business.
Take advantage of the internet while applying Local Search Marketing strategies.
– Take advantage of the free tools offered by search engines to advertise your business
No matter if you utilize a Local Search Marketing Expert or you perform these strategies yourself for your business, you will find that you can build upon a Business Listing.
There are numerous free tools, which you can utilize while expanding your products and services.
This will generate more leads while proving to be not only effective but cost efficient.
You will find this measure is far more effective as compared to the Yellow Pages or other online directories.
– Integration is the key
You must understand that the Local Search does not replace your business website.
You can however integrate your website with the Local Search while ensuring that any questions potential customers might have will be answered.
– Customers have many questions about your business:
More times to none, customers will ask if your business is trustworthy.
They will also request information pertaining to prices, which your business offers on your products and services; which you provide.
Customers will also ask for recommendations of what will be most beneficial for their particular needs.
– Bringing in new customers
You will want to bring in new customers for your business.
If you are successful in your Local Search Marketing strategy, you will find that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to accomplish this; or does it?
On the other hand, you will find that constructing a Local Search Marketing strategy does however require time as well as commitment.
If you are finding yourself stretched too thin or you are confused on some of these tactics, you might want to consider hiring a Local Search Marketing Expert to aid you with your project.
– Stay ahead of the game
Can you believe that the majority of small businesses do not have their own business website? Even though this is hard to believe it is a reality.
Most local small businesses owners don’t have the knowledge or time for accomplishing this task; this is where you will be one-step ahead of your local competitors, with a Local Search Marketing campaign.
In utilizing a Local Search Marketing strategy, you will solve one of the largest challenges for most small businesses, who are needing to get ahead of their local competition.
The most important goal of internet web marketing is to increase traffic to your web site.
You can think of your web site as your shop front; and the more people you can entice to come into your shop front, the more customers you will have.
The best way to increase traffic to your website is to increase your search engine rankings.
This can be a challenge, but with some work and persistence you shouldn’t have too many problems.
The first internet web marketing tip for increasing search engine ranking is to build your internal and incoming links.
Internal links are simply links on your site that link to other pages on your site.
It is important that each of your pages contains links to the all of the other pages on your site.
This will increase the page rank of every page on your web site. Incoming links can be placed on other, smaller websites that you have built.
These other sites will be smaller and you will only need a few pages for them.
Now, put links on these pages that link to your main site and cross link them using the same keywords.
Another thing you should keep in mind in internet web marketing is that you can improve your search engine ranking using some simple HTML tricks.
You know that the Title tag goes directly under the Head tag. In this Title tag you have an excellent opportunity to place some keywords.
Don’t just put them in a list though; make a coherent sentence that explains what your site is and what it can do for the visitor.
Put 4 or 5 of the best keywords in this sentence. Make sure you have 1 or 2 keywords in each of your Heading tags (H1, H2) as well.
Next, you should know a little bit about Meta tags. These tags used to be search engines’ most used method of ranking webs sites.
Today, they are barely used as search engines have moved on to use different methods.
Meta tags are still used occasionally and it will only take a few seconds to put them in, so most people agree that you should have Meta tags in your web page.
Use the META NAME=”description” tag directly under your title tag and make a list of the most relevant key words for your site.
Don’t use popular key words that have nothing to do with your site; search engines do not like this.
The final thing that needs mentioning regards the keywords on your site. The text on your web pages should have some keywords in it. Just use them sparingly.
Put 1 keyword at the beginning of your major paragraphs.
This is enough. If you put too many keywords on your web site then search engines will just see it as spam and ignore it.
Also, never put keywords in where they don’t make sense.
If you keep these and other internet web marketing tips in mind, you are certain to have great success in the promotion of your website.
Social media optimization is similar to search engine media optimization. The goal of social media optimization is to drive huge amounts of people to a specific website.
Social media optimization can also be used to determine whether or not a startup website will be successful or whether it will fall flat with the consumers.
Social media optimization uses new to encourage traffic to a website.
Social media optimization is online tools and platforms that can be used to share opinions, insights, and perspectives.
It can’t take many forms such as text, images, audio, and video.
Popular forms of social media optimization are currently blogs, pod casts, message boards, vlogs, and wikis.
Social media optimization is anything that builds a community where people can rendezvous.
Social media optimization normally includes websites that can be used as a platform to send out a marketing message.
Social media optimization is not something that can be forced. It is considered a type of pull marketing; it only works if people are drawn to it.
Search engine optimization has clear goals. Web developer who use search engine optimization want to have a website that ranks well with the search engines.
The goals of marketers who are trying to use social media optimization are; an increase in inbound links, easy book marking and helping content spread virally.
The rules Web developer who are using social media optimization need to live by are, rewarding valuable (helpful) users, and they need to make sure they are a user resource.
Web developers who are using a social media optimization technique should make sure they participate with their users.
You need to be a part of the blogs and the message boards.
When using this technique you must know their target audience and you need to know what appeals to that particular group of people. It is important to remember that not everybody will love you.
Make sure you create and share content that appeals to them on a personal level.
Despite the fact that social media optimization is a relatively new concept, some people believe that social media optimization will be one of the top marketing trends in coming years because it is something that encourages interaction in a low pressure social environment.
The most successful online businesses all have one thing in common. They all knew how to make search engine optimization work for them.
Search engine optimization is the art and science of making websites attractive to the internet’s search engines.
The first step in successfully achieving stellar search engine optimization is to lure search engine’s web crawlers to your website.
Web crawlers are computer programs that the search engines use gather data and index information from the websites.
The information the web crawlers gather is used to determine the ranking of a webpage.
One of the fastest ways to hamper a web crawler is to construct a website that has frames.
Most search engines have crawlers that can’t penetrate the frames, if they can’t get into a webpage to read it then that webpage remains unindexed and unranked.
Two search engines, Google and Inktomi, have web crawlers that are capable of penetrating frames.
Before submitting your website to a search engine do some research and find out if they have a crawler that is incapable of penetrating any frames.
If you have written frames into your URL it will probably be worth your effort to go back and rewrite your URL’s.
Once you have rewritten your URLs you might be surprised to find that the new addresses are easier on humans as well as web crawlers, the frameless URLs are easier to type in documents as links and references.
Once you have rewritten your URL’s it is time to start submitting your website to search engines.
Some webmasters like to use an automated search engine submission service.
If you decide to go with the submission service you should be aware that there will be a fee involved, the minimum fee is typically fifty-nine US dollars.
This price should keep a few URLs on the search engines for a year.
Other webmasters like to avoid big fees by submitting their website to individual search engine on their own.
Once your webpage is submitted to a search engine you need to sit down and design a crawler page.
A crawler page is a webpage that contains nothing else expect links to every single page of your website, Use the title of each page as the as the link text.
This will also give you some extra keywords that will help improve the ranking the crawlers assign to your website.
Think of the crawler page as a site map to the rest of your website.
Typically, the crawler page won’t appear in the search results.
This happens because the page doesn’t have enough text for the crawlers to give that individual page a high ranking, after all its nothing more than a portal to the rest of your site and your human users won’t need to use it.
Don’t panic if it crawlers don’t instantly appear to index your website.
There are a lot of websites available on the internet that need to be crawled, indexed, and then ranked. It can sometimes take up to three months for a web crawler to get to yours.
Methods that manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, usually in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system is called Spamdexing.
The sheer amount of information available on the internet is mind-boggling.
In 2000 a study indicated that the internet’s search engines where only capable of indexing approximately sixteen percent of available pages.
That sixteen percent adds up to pages and pages of potential hits. There are typically ten hits per page.
The average internet user never goes farther than the first set of ten. Webmasters use a variety of techniques to increase their ranking.
The art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines is called search engine optimization.
The importance of a high search engine ranking started driving webmasters to use a variety of tricks to improve their ranking the middle of the 1990’s.
On May 22, 1996 The Boston Herald printed an article written by Eric Convey titled “Porn Sneaks Way Back on Web.”
It is the first time the term spamdexing was used. The word spamdexing is the merging of the word spam, the internet’s term for unsolicited information, and indexing.
There are two types of spamdexing. The terms are content spam and link spam.
Content spam is the use of techniques that alter the search engines view of the pages content.
Some methods of content spam include the use of hidden text, keyword stuffing, Meta tag stuffing, doorway pages, and scraper sites.
Taking advantage of link-based ranking algorithms which in turn gives a higher ranking to a website is called link spam.
Link spam methods include link farms, hidden links, Sybil attack, wiki spam, spam blogs (also referred to as splogs), page hijacking, buying expired domains, and referrer log spamming.
Some people consider spamdexing a black hat method of internet search engine classification.
Key word stuffing is a favorite type of content spamdexing. Key word stuffing is including a key word hundreds of times on a single webpage.
Given the sheer volume of the word the search engine automatically gives that particular webpage a higher ranking then one that might use the word legitimately.
Most websites that employ keyword stuffing place the words at the bottom of the page or write it with text that the person surfing the web can’t see.
Some search engines try to discourage key word stuffing by ranking websites with an excessive number of keywords at the bottom of the ranking.
Some web masters like to include the name of a famous person on their site as a keyword.
The name attracts the attention of search engines and web surfers even though the web site has nothing to do with the person.
Some websites try to steal web surfers from their competitors by including their name as a keyword in the body text and meta tags.
By doing this the webmaster has guaranteed that the search engines with index it accurately.
Using the name of a competitor in the body of a website is normally a direct violation of the copyright law.
