Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing Definition

The definition of search engine marketing goes like follows, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing where websites are promoted through search engine optimization, contextual advertising, paid placement paid inclusion to increase their visibility.

SEM consist from two parts, each part can be done individually. They are not depending on each other. First part is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and second part is called PPC (Pay-Per-Click). The big difference between those two parts is that SEO is free and PPC cost.

In SEO a person will optimize own webpage to get visibility in search engines, but in PPC person will bid based on keywords in order to get visibility in search engines. SEO is time consuming and with PPC you can get visibility immediately if you have made properly your ad.

Search Engine Marketing Services

There are various search engine marketing services around the internet. Here are listed largest ones.

• Google Adwords
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Microsoft Adcenter

Note: To read reviews of services above, click them.

All of those SEM services have at least one common thing which is the marketing method, that is marketing in search engines but they differ in the way on what kind of services they actually provide, for example each of those services are having own keyword tools, each of those keyword tools are customized according to that SEM service.

Another big differ is the cost of marketing, for example when we speak about PPC prices, Google Adwords has definitely most expensive because it has already received good reputation about its keywords and that they are converting well because of audience. In other hand Yahoo! Search Marketing is doing very well with its keywords even when they have little bit cheaper prices than Google Adwords.

So every service have pros and cons. Best thing to find out what is best for you is that you try them but remember to have experience with PPC if you are planning to do some Search Engine Marketing.

The Future of Search Engine Marketing

SEM seems to be in full motion in future too, but probably there’s going to be that only people and companies who can afford high CPC (Cost-Per-Click) prices can start PPC business to make it success. Reason for this is that in order to get low CPC prices you need to optimize your ads and they must do good performance. This will require lots of testing and testing requires lots of money.

Of course there are other methods like CPM (Cost-Per-Impression), where customer pays for every 1000 impression. Price will vary. This will give good chance to save money if your ad is very powerful because CPC prices are not calculated in CPM.

If those services want to let other people to have possibility to compete in this competition they must lower their CPC prices, otherwise they can’t. If we think this thing more deeply it also have good meaning and that is this will reduce all people out who are not very serious about marketing and also to reduce or taking those people out will make them as better service.

Images

Images can also be optimized. Sometimes people neglect to optimize. Here are some tips to optimize images:

• Add “alt-property” in <img> tag and write inside of alt-property your image name or description. Here’s an example <img src=”image url here” alt=”image name or description here” width=”width here” height=”height here”>
• Preferred image format is .jpg
• Re-upload your images frequently to keep them fresh, for instance once in 3 months
• Enable image search option for Google in Webmaster Tool
• Pay attention to image size. Don’t put big and high quality image to your website. It can take so much time to load that image. Use small and good quality images.
• Use limited amount of images per page. Don’t put all over the page 10s of images. Small amount of images would be enough
• It is reported that uploading images to Flickr will help in Yahoo!

Adding Important Pages

Add at least following pages.

• About Us
• Contact Us
• Disclaimer
• Privacy Policy
• Sitemap

Search Engines likes those pages to be included in website especially Google. Sitemap does not only help search engines but also visitors to find pages easily.

Link Building

Link building is like link exchange. When you start to add links to your website try to add only links of websites that are related to your website. Also pay attention to other websites Google Page Rank they will also effect when you start to add links to your website.

You can add so called “resources” page to your website instead of “links” and add there all links that are related to your website. Don’t add any kind of website link because search engines might consider it as spamming so add only websites that are related to your website.

Website Design

Website design plays big part in optimization. It is one step to keep your website fresh but also it effects to interest of visitors. We mean that if you don’t care about your website design and let it be harsh looking this will give an image about yourself that you don’t care about visitors. So pay attention to website design. It should be clean and easy to navigate. Ads shouldn’t be placed all over the page because they will confuse visitors.

Template should be clean and relative to website subject. Template does not have to be super fancy. Usually simple and clean template makes better work than super fancy template. People will choose simplicity rather than something that is difficult to absorb. Make sure you don’t have broken links.

Picking Up Good Domain Name

Finding a good domain name is not easy task and that’s why you need to spend little bit time with finding good domain name. Good domain name is name that is easy to remember, related to website, not too long and contains your main keyword in it. It is preferred to use .com domain ending because it is easiest to remember.

Spamming Takes Website to the Dark Side!

We took this point out because we really want to stress importance of this point. So what we mean with spamming? Mainly spamming keywords. Adding same repetitive keywords in meta tags and especially in content is destructive step. For example when Google finds out that there are lots of same keywords in one page it will consider it immediately as spam and it will be neglected. This means that it does not effect on your website which means that you can’t get traffic from Google to that specific page. Be careful with your keywords.

For blogs remember to stop spam comments. This can be done by using Aksimet plug-in. It comes with WordPress when installing it. You need to have an API key in order to make it work. For more information about API Keys click here.

So here you got important information on how to optimize your website.

Related Posts:

• How to optimize your website? – Part 1

To make clear what we mean with optimization we mean search engine optimization. Before we go deeply into this subject we highly recommend to know and understand what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is by reading “What is SEO?” article. Click here to read the article.

We are going to cover following optimization points. These are also most important points in optimization process.

• Content
• Keywords
• Meta tags
• Images
• Adding Important Pages
• Link Building
• Website Design
• Picking Up Good Domain Name
• Spamming Takes Website to the Dark Side!

In first part we are going to cover Content, Keywords and Meta Tags optimization. In part 2 we are going to cover rest of points.

Content

It is difficult to stress how important and how big role content is playing in optimization. By adding unique content that includes most important website’s keywords would bring your website up from deep water to surface. Write a search engine friendly content which is easy to understand, good and interesting to read.

Pay attention to misspellings. When you have completed your content for instance an article, post or page of information, revise your content and if you find any misspelling or broken links fix them.

Keywords

Optimizing keywords process will begin by keyword research. Research includes analyzing a website, finding all relative keyword phrases to website and finally adding them to your website.

When starting to analyze a website the first step is to understand what your website is all about. It will be not enough if you just know the basic meaning of your website. You should also know for instance what you want to achieve from your website and what your goals are. Once you find answers to those questions it would be easier to determine important keyword phrases that will be affecting to your website in future.

Once you have good understanding of your website it is time to find all keyword phrases that are related to your website. Choose your keywords wisely and don’t write any kind of keywords. Choose only most important keyword phrases that are related to your website. For instance if you have a website about ‘digital photography’ one of your keywords that you want to add is ‘photography’ or ‘digital photography’ but don’t use ‘digital’ because ‘digital’ word can be related to many different fields and it is quiet board.

After you have found your keyword phrases that are related to your website or blog it is time to add them to your website. Main things where you can add your keyword phrases are in following points:

• Headline
• Page Description
• Page Title
• Content
• Meta Tags
• Images

Meta Tags

Oh boy, sometimes people find meta tags quiet difficult to add and even more difficult to understand them. Now let’s clean the table and we will show you how to do that. If you have already read “7 Essential Tips To Keep Your Website Fresh” then you should know how to add meta tags and therefore you can skip this part and move to next one.

Two very important meta tags to be added to your website are called Description and Keywords. As their names indicate Description means description of website and Keywords all main and relative keyword phrases to your website. Here is how to write them.

<meta name=”Description” content=”Add here your website description”>

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”Add here all related keywords to your website”>

So how to add meta tags? Just adding those meta tags above inside of <head> tag and replace content with the content of that specific meta tag. Here is an example of how and where you should add your meta tags.

<html>

<head>

<meta name=”description” content=”This is one example of Affiliate Marketing For All article 7 essential things to keep your website fresh.”>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”website, affiliate marketing, update”>

</head>

<body>

Your main content will be here.

</body>

</html>

SEO is a big process because it involves links, content, keywords, tags, graphics and images to be optimized. All main steps in SEO are listed below and their explanations:

• Keyword Research
• Analyzing website and its traffic
• Content
• Link Building

There are also other things that are required like building a privacy policy page and in some cases disclaimer page. Lots of website owners might consider privacy policy page as a small thing and that it is not necessary to have but it has huge role in SEO.

Optimization is nowadays more and more important. Especially when speaking about website which generates revenue. Reason for this is traffic. The more traffic your site gets the more sales you will probably generate. More sales you will generate more money you will earn.

There are lots of companies that offer SEO service for some specific amount of money. If your website requires SEO you can do it by yourself or by using SEO services that some companies provide.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one key element in SEO. It is very important to understand what keywords are related to your website. It involves not only with content but also with images, website description and keywords. For example with images you can add alternate text that work as description of image or with website description and keywords you can add inside of <head>-tag following meta-tags

<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”Description here”>

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”Keywords here”>

Don’t make very long description or huge keyword list. For keywords use only relevant keywords. All keywords are separated by comma sign.

Analyzing – Important step

One of the big SEO steps is analyzing website and its traffic. Analyzing your website and its traffic is vital step in SEO because when you analyze your website and traffic you will know how to optimize your website or at least get ideas. By understanding your website you will know which elements are affecting on it. For example by changing layout or just by adding more content can bring you lots of traffic or decrease amount of traffic. Still you have to be careful with content.

Why I have to be careful with content?

Answer for that is keyword spamming. This means repeating same keyword many times in content. Search engines don’t like spamming and nowadays especially they are quiet developed. For example when Google sends crawler (website update checker) to your website and it recognize that you have repeated same word more than five times your content will be not shown on Google because Google consider it as spam.

Link Building

Link building is a step where website owner adds links that are relevant to own website. The more relevant websites that is linked to your website the more important search engines consider your website. More important your website is better ranking your website will get which will bring more traffic.

Link building can be done by two parties. Each one will add others website link to their website. Those links are not necessary to be in main page but at least they should be in some page in the website. For example you can create page called links or other relevant name to that link page and there you can add all website’s links that you have direction with.