A successful search engine marketing campaign starts not with the



engines, but with your own site and with the site's users (i.e. your

customers). The goal or intended outcome of something. It is important

to define the purpose of the website as one of the first steps in the

planning process. A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the

planning process. Setting short and long term goals for the website will

define more the purpose and plan for the future in terms of expansion,

modification, and improvement will take place.

Set targets for your campaign

Before embarking on any marketing campaign, online or otherwise, you

should have a clear idea of what you hope to achieve. It may be to

increase traffic to your site, to receive more inquiries from site

visitors, or to increase the value of new orders. By understanding your

customers and your competitors, you will be able to tailor your product

effectively to fit the needs of your target audience while not

duplicating products already on the market.

Translate your business definitions into search phrases

Make a list of words and phrases that describe your service. Try them

out in search engines to see what sort of results get returned. View the

sites of leading competitors in your field and look out for useful words

in the text of their pages.

Structure your site around your search phrases

Sketch out a map of your site, with pages categorized into sections.

Each page should be given a title that reflects the search terms that

you are targeting for that page. This map can act as the basis for your

site.

Design your pages to attract search engine traffic

These design guidelines are specifically intended to increase the

likelihood of a page being relevant to a given search phrase, but they

also work pretty well for humans and are unlikely to make your pages any

less readable. True images, animations and designs are one of the

important elements because somehow this makes a site more fun and less

boring. But excessive use of this elements would just make your visitor

get irritated so limit your animations and images because content and

clear identified goal still matters.

Submit your site to Directories and Search Engines

Before submitting your site to any directories, you should be satisfied

that the/ TITLE/ and /DESCRIPTION/ of your home page reflect your most

important search terms and that they convey the right impression of your

site. This should be the text that is submitted (if you've already

submitted a different description to Yahoo, it is very unlikely that you

will be able to persuade them to change your listing).

Get your site linked from other sites

Identify other sites that offer complementary services which are likely

to be of interest to users of your site; link to them and invite them to

reciprocate. In particular, do this with popular sites and do it with

those sites that appear near the top of searches that use the keyword

phrases that you are targeting. Link building is not all about search

engine optimization, it's not about boosting your Google Page Rank, it's

not about publishing a link directory and it's not about swapping links

with as many other websites as possible. The reality is that many people

are disappointed with the trickle of links and the trickle of traffic

that their efforts produce.

Monitor the results

Check your ranking on the major search engines for your most important

search phrases and your site coverage (i. e. the number of your pages

indexed) on the major search engines.