Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing as it sometimes refer as “SEM” is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of a particular web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.

Search Engine Marketing Guide

There is a lot involved when it comes to search engine marketing. Sometimes, it can be a bit overwhelming, even for those with a great deal of experience. But never the less by taking it one step at a time, it is not hard to learn. And once learned, search engine marketing can provide an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to your web site

Below are the following steps to search engine marketing

•Keywords & Search Terms: - The first step is to learn about the search terms that your target audience is using when using search engines. These search terms are the keywords and key phrase that will be used to market your web site.

Search terms refer to the words and phrases that people type into the search forms of search engines, eg digital camera, Keywords and key phrases on the other hand are the words on you have on your site that match these search terms.

Search engines spiders and search engines users look at the keywords and key phrases on your website in order to index it. Therefore you keywords and key phrase should be well structured to really reflect the information you are sending to your audience, Before you do any type of search engine marketing, you have to understand your target audience and know the search terms they are using. Once you know the search terms being used, these can be included in the content of your Web site as keywords and key phrases. This would be a very terrible mistake if it is otherwise.
•Search engine optimization: - in a simple word, SEO is the process of optimizing one's website to get better results in search engines.

Having a good search engine optimization is very basic. The design and content of a good search engine has to be optimized because the parameters that make a web page or web site friendly for search-engine and for viewers may be different. Therefore, an optimized solution has to be obtained for best results. SEO is more of a process than a single action and it takes time and an intelligent to achieve best result.
A successful search engine optimization campaign will usually contain these essential components:

Content: - This is what drives search engine rankings, content is what brings users to your site, and content, when sprinkled appropriately with keyword phrases, will feed search engine spiders. Rinse, repeat. This is very important search engine optimization.

Simple Site Design. Sites that are successful in the search engine results have this in common-they are all simply designed, with a minimum of bandwidth hogging graphics, slowly loading animations or other such frippery, and are easy to navigate. Simple, clean designs are what search engine spiders and search engine users like, because it enables them to get to what they're looking for; which is - you guessed it - content.

Well-written Meta tags. Meta tags-keyword, description, and title- are important, but they won't make or break your site. Meta tags are merely part of the overall success strategy. They need to be written with compelling, keyword phrase-heavy content that will make the user click through from the search results page.

•Search engine submission: -“SES” is the act of submitting specific URLs to popular search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! to ensure the web page gets spidered and indexed. While Search Engine Submission is often seen as a way to promote a web site, it generally is not necessary. Because the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use crawlers, bots, and spiders that eventually would find all by themselves most web sites on the Internet.

Ways to submit a website

There are basically three ways to get your site listed in a search engine:
Submit your site directly to the search engine using a free submit form.
Let the search engine find your site through links to your site from other sites such as directories.
Pay the search engine to index your site.

•Link popularity: - refer to the number of incoming links that you have to your site from other sites. These links can be from directories, articles, or web sites. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better.
The number and quality of links that you have pointing to your site are a factor that many search engines consider when determining the rank or your site and individual pages of your site. Also, the more incoming links you have, the greater the traffic to your site

How to get a link popularity

Submit your site to web directories; directory links are great. They'll have your keywords in the link text & description, on a page with a topic relevant to yours. People browsing through the directory can find your site as well.
Sites in your field; when you find a website similar to yours (even a competitor!), or on a related topic, consider asking them for a link. Don't forget informational sites, professional organizations, & forums.
Forums & Emails; put a link to your website in your signature if you participate in online discussions (if it's permitted). Every post you make will give you a link (albeit one that may not carry a lot of weight).
It will happen naturally; Once your site offers something of value, people will begin to link to it because they want to. And, some of these links will be from relevant sites and one other ways is by asking your visitors to link to you by including a "link to us" page that provides link code & some graphics.

Checking Your Link Popularity
After creating link popularity, it is advisable to check your link popularity. This can be done through Marketleap, they provide a tool called the Link Popularity Check. It is a great way to periodically check the number of incoming links to your site.

•Paid inclusion: -A search engine marketing model in which a Web site pays a fee to a search engine that then guarantees that the Web site will be displayed in the returned search results for specifically named search terms. It is also often called PFI (Pay for Inclusion) or PPI (Pay Per Inclusion).

Paid inclusion, for some search engines, also means that the search engine’s spiders will crawl their sites more often than non-paid sites. Different search engines treat paid inclusion results differently; some indicate the paid inclusion results as advertisements while others display them as results alongside non-paid search results. This option is becoming more popular with both site owners and search engines. Site owners that want to get indexed quickly like it because they don't have to wait for the search engines to find their sites naturally through incoming links and listings in directories. Search engines like it because it is a way to increase revenue by charging the site owners for this service. If you have the budget and you don't want to wait, this is a good option.

•Pay Per Click Search Engines: -Pay Per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked