Search Engine Marketing.. what does this mean ?part 1ByEsta Weiss Los Angeles, CA (rushprnews) 02/22/2007 – What does it mean to market: it means making visible and attractive your products and services in order to reach your target audience, resulting in sales. In the age of electronic commerce and of search engines, the importance of understanding how search engines work and index your site is crucial.And to achieve visibility, you need to develop a search engine marketing This is a lot like search engine optimization (SEO), which is the act of optimizing a site for the engines but where SEO concerns itself mainly with how the site itself is laid out and organized, marketing ‘concern is selling the site to the world at large. The primary difference between online and a brick-and-mortar business is that traditionally you must seek the customer out to generate sales, online they are seeking you out, looking for the likes-of-you. In other words, marketing through the engines is primordial tool. In the process of creating you webpages, you need to consider the following questions: The Copy or text of the site: The site itself must be able to sell the goods, even if they are primarily service or news and information. Is the site well written? In regular English and not in business jargon? Do all the pages contain keywords that viewers are likely to type to find you? Have you done the keyword research to see what are the commonly used words for your topic or industry ? Are the pages accurately titled to reflect the content? Today’s surfer is sophisticated but pressed for time, so the best sites are the ones where the information seeked is easily located, which brings us to my next point … Website Usability: Usability has several meanings. Is the site user-friendly? Is your site being created in a familiar fashion with the competition to put your viewer at ease? Is the font readable and large enough in all screen resolutions? How easy is it to navigate from one page to another? Does it follow a logical and predictable pattern? Can it be converted or translated into other languages? Did you refer back to a translator? Can persons with disabilities use the site? How well does the content takes into account your target viewer, its age group, its socio-economic factor? For every site the answers and solutions to these questions will be somewhat different, but over all they are issues that you must take into account if you wish to ” market” your site. Good sites are planned and organized. Niche Web sites: As a client of mine said to me recently ” how can I sell X when there are millions selling it already” ? Answer ? Never mind the millions, that first 5 pages of search results are your competitors, forget the rest of them. Two, choose a niche within that larger topic that you can focus on that the ” big boys” are ignoring. Larger is not necessarily better and too wide of offerings and you lose focus. Pick a focus and stay with it. It allows the engines to list you as an ” authority ” site on that subject. Site Submission You have to be ON the engines in order to be found by anyone, how do to that ? You can do it all by hand ( which I highly recommend ) for free to most engines. There are many sites full of links to site submissions pages for search engines. Time frames from date of submission to when you are listed vary. You can pay for rapid submission which may get you there sooner, but I don’t recommend it in most cases. As it will not help you much with relevancy or ranking contary to popluar opinion. Pay per click ads, where you have purchased ad space, may or may not be useful, as peoples eyes tend to drift right over the top of such results when using the engines, to get to the ” organic ” results. Lets face it people are tired of advertisements and will generally ignore anything that even remotely looks like an ad. The engines themselves are much to blame for the failure, as all too often the site in the sponsored space is not the the most relevant site. People have learned that through personal experience, so buying ad space may not be in your best interest. Now does this mean just hit any and all engines ? No. You have to reach ” your ” viewer, which means targeting them by placing your site in the engines and directories that your chosen viewer may frequent. This requires thought and planning as you have to do your homework as to what engines and directories will best serve your needs. How to find them ? Simple, plug the words “search engine” or “directory”, along with your site topic, into any large meta engine (that searches many engines at once ) and follow the leads it gives you. This is a repeated event,as new engines and directories are born everyday. Your only other decision to make is are you going do it yourself, use automated software, or hire someone to do it for you. As this can be a time consuming process. LinkBuilding: Nearly all the engines have a link popularity formula that is part of their ranking system. Therefore, back links pointing to the site are important to have. However, you don’t want just any links, only relevant links to your topic. Marketing again, target your viewer and only your viewer who will be interested in what you have. Link exchange that does not bring you targeted traffic is useless. You can, seek these out yourself via direct requests to site holders with a link exchange request letter.You can join a link exchange program and swap links with other membersYou can invest in automated software that will seek out link partners.You can become an affiliate of related companiesYou can even buy links How you do this depends a great deal on your time and funding allowances. However you do it , the number of back links must grow as the site ages. This is an ongoing process. How to find places you might want to exchange with ? Same as before, go to a meta engine and plug in your main site topic or keywords for your topic and watch the returns. These will be, in order of relevance, the most popular sites related to your topic. Check them out to see if a link with them would be reasonable or possible and check to see who “they” link to and who those sites link to etc. etc.. Analyze your competition and see what they have done, nothing works like success. As you can see, this is the same behavior over and over, using the engines themselves to find the information you need for what engines and directories to submit the site to. And what sites to try and get linked up with in order to bring to your web door the viewer who most wants to see/buy what you have. More soon.Esta Weiss
www.annehowardpublicist.com
