Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is the key to your online promotion efforts. Yes, there are other avenues of marketing, but search engine marketing is where you will succeed or fail.
Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing comes down to two areas, pay-per-click and search engine optimization. If you can master both of these areas, you are going to be so far ahead of the competition that it will not be funny. Well, at least for your competitors. Following you will find some general articles on the subject as well as specific articles on pay-per-click and search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Potential clients often call to mention they are interested in pursuing search engine marketing. I ask them what they mean by search engine marketing and they often are not sure.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

What is search engine marketing? It is a global term that refers to all the different ways you can market a site on the zillion or so search engines out there. In truth, it is a catch all term for most people who know they should probably have a website, but not much more than that. It is like walking up to a real estate agent and saying you need a house.

If you have a business, you need a site. If you have site, you must need search engine marketing. Logically, this makes sense. In the practical world of internet marketing, however, search engine marketing is a very broad term. It encompasses a wide variety of things.

When most people use the phrase, they are really saying something else to a marketing company like ours. What they are saying is I need exposure for my site. I need to get people from the search engines to my site. Most important, I need them to buy. If this is your general thought process, you are thinking along the correct line of thought. There is, however, a problem.

Search engine marketing has a number of distinct areas. You can read about them here: “The Key Elements of Search Engine Marketing”. The problem, of course, is most sites should only use a certain type of search engine marketing. The role of a good search engine marketing firm such as ours is to identify those areas, explain why they should be used and successfully carry out a campaign for your site.

In general, search engine marketing is just a catch-all phrase that really means very little. If you are considering marketing for your site, make sure to get a more detailed understanding of what you are getting into and why you should do so.

The Key Elements of Search Engine Marketing

When it comes to search engine marketing, there are a wide variety of ways to go. Here are the top approaches, to wit, the key elements of search engine marketing.

The Key Elements of Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is a very general term that more or less encompasses most types of online marketing. It is by far the most effective way to generate traffic to your site. Traffic simply refers to the number of people coming to your site. Unlike rush hour on your local freeway, you want as much traffic as possible coming to your site. With search engine marketing, there are a couple of different ways to go about this.

Pay-per-click marketing is the simplest form of search engine marketing. It is also the most expensive and the least credible. With “PPC” marketing, you are simply paying for the placement of a small ad on the search engine in question. The problem, of course, is you are paying! If you are not careful, your return on investment can be atrocious and wipe you out within a few months. To make matters worse, many people fraudulently click ads just to use up your budget. This, of course, makes your return on investment even worse. PPC has its place, but it should never be relied upon as a total solution to your marketing needs.

Search engine optimization is the next method in the search engine marketing arena. With “SEO”, the goal is to get your site ranked in the top 10 in the search results for specific keywords. All the clicks you then receive are free, which makes your return on investment very high. The downside to SEO is it takes time to get those rankings. A new site can expect to wait six to nine months before even getting a sniff of a ranking on Google. Yahoo and MSN take less time, but not much less. Most sites run PPC campaigns during the first year while they wait for the rankings.

Article marketing is the third and newest element of search engine marketing. With this approach, you write articles for your site and submit them to clearing house sites known as directories. Webmasters for other sites can then use them so long as they also publish an author byline including your name and a link to your site. When the article is published on other sites, people start clicking the link and you have traffic.

For most sites, all of these elements of search engine marketing are used at one point or another. The ultimate goal is to get rankings through search engine optimization and sit back while the free traffic rolls in and sales occur.

Most Effective Search Engine Marketing

With its global audience, the Internet provides a unique revenue generation platform with search engines. In this article, we discuss the most effective search engine marketing.
Most Effective Search Engine Marketing

Search engines are similar to the streets of a city. Some search engines represent the major avenues where people congregate while others are more similar to back alleys where almost nobody goes.

Cutting to the chase, your search engine marketing should focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines control the vast majority of traffic on the Internet. Not only do lots of people uses these engines to find things, the big three provide search results to many other search engines as well. For instance, Google supplies ads and search results for AOL. Dogpile compiles the various search results from the big three in its listings. Alta Vista uses Yahoo search results. This scenario is so expansive that the big three search engines control 90 to 95 percent of all search traffic on the web. This means you need to focus on them to the exclusion of others.

The most effective search engine marketing comes in two forms – pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Other forms of search engine marketing, such as banner ads, produce poor results and should be avoided. Let’s take a closer look at the big two.

Pay-per-click advertising [ppc] is platform whereby you pay for placement on a search engine. The two major ppc platforms are Overture and Google Adwords. Overture places ads on the Yahoo and MSN search engines. Google Adwords places ads on Google and AOL search results. Both platforms place ads on other search engines and sites, but the resulting traffic is nominal.

The advantage of PPC advertising is you get immediate traffic for your site. You can use the traffic to test the content on the site and whether visitors convert into paying customers. The downside is you are paying for traffic, which means you must pay close attention to your return on investment. All and all, PPC advertising should be used at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign while you wait for optimized pages to get natural rankings.

Search engine optimization [seo] is by far the most effective search engine marketing. Once you obtain top three rankings for a keyword, you receive more traffic than you would from ppc and it is all free! This does wonders for your profitability. For example, we pursued seo for this site and have top rankings. Our marketing cost for the site is $0. This greatly improves our profit margins. You should aim for the same with your site.

The downside to seo is it takes a lot of time and work. You can expect to wait up to a year for top Google rankings, although Yahoo and MSN rankings will appear much sooner. In light of this waiting period, PPC advertising is a must at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign.

Search engine marketing is a fairly simple game. The most effective search engine marketing platforms are PPC and seo. Stick to these two and you should see good results.