Search Engine Marketing

November 1, 2010

Search engine marketing is the practice of advertising or publicizing your website through search engines, like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) may contain one or more of the following:

• Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search engine optimization is an implementation of techniques to maximize your rankings in organic search results, or natural. Organic search results are ranked web pages returned by search engine when searching for a word or phrase specific – “keyword” or “phrase.”

• Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) – ads you place for your website with a search engine like Google or Yahoo. You bid the amount you are willing to pay per click. The more you bid, the higher your ad will appear in search engine results. Google AdWords has implemented additional factor when ranking ads that is based on the relevance or importance that Google places on your site, and it is very difficult to maneuver. You can also use pay per click advertising to your advantage on your site. For example, you can make money with Google AdSense and other similar programs.

• payment for inclusion (PFI) – In addition to search engines, like Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, there are many directories on the Internet. These libraries may be general in nature or related to a particular topic. You can get free listings in some online directories, like DMOZ, but most libraries now charge for listing. Verizon’s SuperPages directory example of the PFI. Another example of a large library is again, Yahoo. Yahoo Directory, which is separate from the Yahoo search, Yahoo is described in words such as : subject-based directory listing web sites in a variety of topics, from arts, entertainment, society and culture, science, education, health.

Why search engine marketing important?

You may or may not decide to do search engine marketing as part of your marketing and advertising strategy. If you do not have a website for your business and do not mean once, you definitely do not have search engine marketing. However, today’s business climate, almost all businesses are expected to be the best site to do. Search engine marketing is used as a way to get traffic to your website, which in turn should lead to getting new customers to your business adding revenue. Compared with other means of marketing and advertising, search engine marketing can be very economical. For example, you can apply some search engine optimization techniques on your own. Organic search rankings are free, so if you can move yourself rankings, your traffic should increase, which, in turn, should increase your business revenue. Similarly, Pay Per Click advertising can be very expensive. Since you can set limits on how much you’re willing to pay per click how much you spend each day, it’s pretty easy to keep costs in the industry. Also, some web directories – like DMOZ – allow free listings, others can cost as little as $ 30 per year.

How do I SEM Measure Effectiveness?

How do you measure the effectiveness of the program to your search engine marketing depends on what your goals were when you started. If your intention was only to increase the number of visitors to your web site, you will determine if your SEM efforts were successful by comparing the stats web traffic before and after you implemented search engine marketing.

Be patient though, search engine marketing efforts may take a long time to increase your traffic. Although you can get immediately to your PPC ads running, if you are aiming to improve traffic through SEO, it could be several months before you see solid results – mostly through Google. Also, if the registration request from the DMOZ directory, your listing may not appear for 6 months to a year. DMOZ is staffed by volunteers, that DMOZ listings can be a positive effect on your ranking organic search, is by far the most popular directory without registering valuable to Web.

In addition to website traffic, you need to track your conversion rates. For example, if as a result of your search engine marketing efforts, your traffic doubles 250-500 visitors a month, how many new customers do you acquire from 250 more visitors to your site. Are you now have twice as many clients as you did before? Probably not. If picked up five customers and your conversion rate will be 2 percent of the new movement (5 divided by 250) and 1 percent (5 out of 500) overall.

Find ways to increase the number of visitors to your site, and then find ways to increase the conversion rates of these visitors, and you know exactly what it takes to make your search engine marketing program successful.