An executive, non technical introduction to the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and a guide to selecting an SEO provider.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a vital part of any successful online marketing strategy. The effectiveness, accountability and transparency of SEM has made it the most widely used online marketing medium in the world.
The purpose of SEM is to increase visibility on search engines such as Google. Visibility can be developed through either paid or natural listings. On Google, the paid listings appear as 'sponsored links' above and to the right side of the main natural listings. The means of building visibility via paid listings is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC), while the process of building natural/organic search engine visibility is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In this article we will focus on SEO.
How do search engines actually work?
To understand how to approach SEO it's useful to understand the basics of how search engines determine their natural results. Their process, in simple terms, is:
* Search engine programs, called 'web crawlers', or 'spiders', browse the Web and take copies of billions of pages that they later process. The spiders crawl from page to page and from website to website, following hyperlinks. A search engine will index all the pages of your website if it can easily find it's way to them. * The searcher types a query into a search engine, for example, 'buy designer shoes in Ireland'. * The search engine software quickly sorts through millions of pages in its database to find the pages that best match this query. If your website or even a page from your website has content about buying designer shoes in Ireland you could possibly rank highly for this search query. * The search engine presents a set of results based on a complex rating system. Search engines are looking for sites that:
? they can easily index ? have the right keywords and phrases ? are popular (mostly measured by the number of other websites that link to them) ? have some history ? not new sites
Remember that Google's paid and natural search systems operate completely independently. A paid search engine advertising campaign on Google will not have any effect, positive or negative, on your natural search engine listings in Google.
How to boost your search rankings
The search engines do not disclose the details of their rating systems however a website's natural search engine visibility can be greatly enhanced if firstly, it has a high ?popularity? rating and secondly, is search engine-friendly.
Increasing a websites popularity rating:
The ?popularity? of your website as measured by the search engines will largely determine your search engine rankings. ?Popularity? is also referred to as search power or search engine credibility. Google refer to their measure of popularity as 'PageRank' and score sites from 1 to 10. If you download and install the Google toolbar you can see the ?PageRank? that Google has assigned to your Web pages. No matter how search friendly a website is, if it has a low popularity rating it will not be highly ranked on search engines.
The most reliably way to build popularity is to develop quality, relevant links to your website from other websites. Links to your website increase the popularity of your website and boost your natural rankings with search engines. At Digino we have found that the most successful way to do this is to carry out a comprehensive series of Web directories registrations. Over the past 5 years we have build up a database of over 1,000 Web directories that we have measured to have an affect on a site's search power. We use a semi-automated process to register sites with selected directories over a period of time.
Developing a search engine friendly website
Ideally a website is firstly designed, written, built and managed in a search engine-friendly manner. However, whether a site is search engine friendly or not it can be ?optimisted? to boost it's search rankings. A search engine optimisation program will usually encompass analysing your website's underlying code, architecture and page content and then making various changes to the site to boost rankings. The SEO of your website needs to be ethical and in accordance with rules set out by the search engines. If the SEO of your website blatantly flaunts these rules the search engine may penalise your search rankings and ultimately can remove your website from the search engine results.
My realization led me to write this article. My goal here is to outline the general process and techniques we employ for organic search engine marketing.
I'm going to construct the body of this article with the following sections:
1. Organic search engine marketing v. paid search engine marketing (PPC) 2. Blogs v. static web pages 3. Long tail keywords v. short head keywords 4. Unique content and Web 3.0 5. Internet marketing and Web 2.0
Organic search engine marketing is marketing a website to increase the ranking for its web pages in the organic, or natural, search engine results pages (SERPs).
Paid search engine marketing is incorporating paid advertising strategies such as Google® Adwords or Yahoo® Search Marketing in order to be listed in the "sponsored" or "advertisement" sections of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
With the increasing costs of paid search engine marketing, advertisers have been suffering from a downward trend in return on investment (ROI). On the other hand, with more sophisticated and proven strategies for organic search engine marketing, the return on investment (ROI) for those who market to rank higher naturally in the SERPs is increasing. Therefore, we advise ecommerce companies, affiliates and super-affiliates alike to shift their resources from paid search engine marketing to organic search engine marketing.
2. Blogs v. Static Web Pages
Blogs have an inherent and distinct advantage over static web pages. Search engines like blogs better. Everything being equal (design, content, page layout, H tags, Alt tags, age, etc.), a blog page will outrank a static web page more often than not. However, all things are not equal! Blogs take advantage of plug-ins, or features, to be very search engine friendly.
We create and customize "Power Blogs" for our clients. A "Power Blog" is a search engine friendly WordPress blogs with tons of SEO plug-ins. Once we install a Power Blog we use it as a platform for Web 2.0 marketing, a.k.a. social marketing.
The benefits of our Power Blog include:
(A) Multi-Channel Visitor Strategy - Instead of having Google® be responsible for 95% of your visitors, now you can also get visitors from all of the Blog Search Engines. Because blogs use RSS (really simple syndication), you will find that other websites are syndicating your content on their websites, bringing you more visitors and links. By having multiple streams of visitors you protect yourself in case one of your traffic streams starts to underperform.
(B) Free Links To Your Site - The amount of links that you have to your site plays a huge role in how highly you rank on Google®. By utilizing the Trackback feature in Wordpress, you can automatically get other websites to link to you for free.
3. Long Tail Keywords v. Short Head Keywords
Remember, this is called "Organic Search Engine Marketing".....it's marketing, and marketing needs a focus. In order to focus in on what to market for, you need to have a solid foundation of the main keywords that describe your business and/or products that you are selling. These main keywords are one to three phrase keywords (or keyword phrases) generally speaking and are more than likely highly competitive. These types of keywords are known as "Short Head" keywords. For example, "car insurance."
Once you know your short head keywords, you will want to market directly to more specific, longer keywords related to the main short head keywords. These longer, more specific keywords are known as "Long Tail" keywords. For example, "car insurance discounts in Georgia."
Although the traffic for each long tail keyword is usually much less than its short tail relative, if you add up all the long tail keywords, they will usually add up to much more traffic and most importantly, targeted traffic, than the short tail keywords alone.
4. Unique Content and Web 3.0
Once you have targeted the long tail keywords for your business or niche, then you can start marketing for them.
The cornerstone for organic search engine marketing is unique content creation. Whether it's 500-word articles, blog posts, blog comments, forum posts, social snippets, or videos, you are going to want to be able to create unique content based on your long tail keywords.
Web 3.0 is a term that refers to the future of the World Wide Web. In our opinion, that future includes the "Semantic Web" or web use affected by artificial intelligence. Sounds kind of like Star Wars®, Alien and E.T. all wrapped into one big and scary WWW...doesn't it?! Well, not really of course. Semantic Web in this case just means that search engines will be able to figure out what a web page is all about in a different, more intelligent way. The major idea here is that search engines will take a more encompassing view at a page and understand its meaning rather making a determination based on figuring out which keywords pop up most often. In this new Web 3.0 scenario, a search engine might find a web page on "sun tanning in Florida" to also be quite relevant to "sun tan oil application" and therefore list this example page in the search engine results pages under both keywords.
What does Web 3.0 mean to you? Basically, when creating your unique content, keep the semantic web concept in mind and use synonyms for your target keyword wherever it's natural. Never stuff keywords in your content, i.e. use a keyword just to use it and not when it should be used naturally...and never stuff keyword synonyms either!
5. Internet Marketing and Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is the "Social Web," so naturally, the concept of social marketing should apply to today's Internet Marketing strategies.
Social marketing includes posting on social networking, social news and social bookmarking websites.
You can also think of blogging as part of Web 2.0, and of course you're covered because you have read Section 2 above.
In conclusion, whether you own your own ecommerce business and sell your own products, or if you are an affiliate or super-affiliate, organic search engine marketing must be on your "actions list." In the long run, outranking your competitors in the search engine results pages proves to bring a higher return on investment (ROI) than trying to out-advertise your competitors in paid search engine marketing.
You now have the basic know-how to create your organic search engine marketing strategy.
Both Shane Scully & Brooks Donner are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Shane Scully has sinced written about articles on various topics from Internet Marketing, Travel Insurance. Article written by Digino marketing:Digino is an ?>internet marketing company based in Ireland.. Shane Scully's top article generates over 14800 views. to your Favourites.
Brooks Donner has sinced written about articles on various topics from Fitness, Gym and Get Ex Back. Want more visitors to your website? We can help you! Contact TopLine Media Group today to start driving unlimited & free targeted traffic using our