search engine marketing

Why should you care about search engines marketing? Because when your prospective clients look for the services and products, they turn to one of the major search engines. If your site comes up on the first page, the higher the placement the better, you are likely to get some quality traffic to your website; the kind of traffic that converts into sales.

Search engine marketing means doing whatever you can to get your site up on the search results of the popular search engines, for the search terms of your choice. It encompasses understanding how search engines work, what makes them prefer one site over another, and tweaking your site to fit their preferences. Another term for this is search engine optimization. Getting good placement for popular search terms is hard, and not always achievable, especially if your competition is also applying search engine marketing techniques.
In this article we aim at covering the very basics of search engine optimization. Huge potential profits awaiting those at the top of the search engine charts. That's why search engine marketing has turned into a niche in its own right, with specialists providing search engine optimization services. Understanding which techniques to apply and which to avoid is no simple task. What’s more, search engines often change their algorithms, so what worked in 2004 will not necessarily be working today.

Determining Your Key Phrases

The first stage in search engine marketing, is deciding on your key terms. If your business is selling candles, you want good placements on the search engines for terms such as "candles", "candle shopping", "buy candles" and so on. Coming up first place for the term "ear wax" won't be very helpful…
Be realistic. Competing for the term "candles" may be too hard. Focusing on a group of terms such as "homemade wax candles", "scented candles" and "wholesale candles" might be better. Use tools such as Wordtracker to show you which terms are popular search terms and which are more competitive than others.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

On-Page search engine optimization refers to elements you can change on your page, whether visible to the surfers or not. Here are the key elements  –

Optimized Content
Search engines try to see your page as a human visitors would, but they are limited to reading text only and cannot see the images. That is why they pay special attention to the actual text content on your page. Make sure your text contains your keywords and key phrases. Work them into your text naturally. Have plenty of text on each page. Remember, text is search engine food and you don't want to leave them hungry.
If you do use images, make sure you use the "alt" tag for a brief description of the image. Work your keywords into that description as well.

Site Structure
Your site structure and internal linking system effects the way search engines map your site. If there is a specific page that you want the search engines to pay attention to, make sure it's well-linked to/from your other pages.

Title and Headings
The title tag on each page tells the browser what needs to be displayed on the top bar. It also tells search engines what your page is about. Make sure your title tag reflects your search terms for each and every page. Another key element is Headings. Use proper html heading tags (H1 and H2 tags) for your headings. They tell the search engine to pay special attention to them when determining what your page is about. Again, make sure they include your search terms.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are special tags written into the html code of your page. They are invisible to human surfers but visible to search engines bots. Years ago, search engines used to rely on meta tags to tell them what your site is about. Since meta tags are so easy to manipulate, they are no longer considered by the major search engines. Don't be bothered with packing lots of keywords into your meta tags. They simply don't matter anymore.
Avoiding Search Engine Spam
Years ago, on-page optimization often meant cramming keywords into your page. To avoid putting off the human visitors, some people used same colored fonts and background for this purpose. This is one example of search engine spamming techniques. These are no longer tolerated by the major search engines and could get your site penalized and even banned.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

Simply put, off-page search engine optimization refers to getting as many links pointing at your site as possible. Search engines count links to your site and consider it a sign to the site's importance on the web. It's possible to check for the number of backlinks for each web page in Yahoo, MSN Search and Google for a good indication of a pages' popularity. Check your website and the competition's and set a realistic goal for increasing the number of incoming links for your site.
A few tips about getting backlinks to your site –
  • Incoming links should be coming from pages that are on the same topic as your pages. If you're marketing your candles business, try to get links from other sites dealing with candles.
  • The text used to link to your site with is significant. Try to make sure the links are descriptive and include your search terms. A link saying "Scented Candles" is much better than "Click Here".
  • One-way links are better than reciprocal links. If possible try to get sites to link to your site without reciprocating from your site.
  • Online directories can give you some great one-way links. Links should be from category pages that reflect the topic of your site. Submit your site to as many directories as you can, or hire someone to do it for you.
  • Make sure incoming links from your link partners are available for search engines to follow. They need to be straight html links, not using javascripts of redirects.
Feeling overwhelmed by search engine marketing? You should. If you want to compete for search engines you should do so seriously. Either hire a search engine marketing consultant, or educate yourself about search engine optimization.