The concept behind Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is quite simple: when a consumer or business person searches the Web through either a text box or by clicking through a directory hierarchy, they are in hunt mode. This mode is unique because it indicates that the person is looking for information, usually of a direct or indirect commercial nature. Marketers understand that this hunt mode means that the searcher may very well be somewhere in the buying cycle, researching a product or service to try and satisfy an immediate need or future need. That makes search engine results some of the best sources of targeted traffic, whether that traffic originates from “organic” unpaid search listings or paid advertising listings.
To leverage the power contained within this targeted traffic source, marketers must understand how to effectively use both paid Pay Per Clickor PPC and organic SEM popularly known as SEO and what they can expect each methodology to achieve.
Search engine traffic is unique in the following ways:
• Search engine traffic is a non-intrusive method of Internet marketing. The majority of online and offline advertising intrudes on the audience, interrupting their activities. Search is unique in tapping a searcher at the exact moment they are seeking knowledge or a solution. Searchers are on a mission it’s just-in-time marketing.
• Search engine traffic originates from a voluntary, audience-driven search. This means the visitors from a search results link have not only selected your listing from among your peers, but chose the search query that resulted in your listing being shown.
• Search engine traffic results from a fixed inventory of searches. To truly qualify as search engine traffic (or pure search traffic), the search must be one that the searcher initiated as a search (say via Google), either by clicking a search link in a directory style portal (say Yahoo) or by filling out a search query box.
• Organic search engine marketing (achieved from SEO) combines the best practices of technology, usability, copy/linguistics and online PR. This is because many search engines base their relevancy algorithms on a combination of the text they see on a page or site, combined with external elements such as links and user behaviors/preferences.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Organic SEM
Unpaid (otherwise known as organic or algothimic) search engine traffic was once fairly easy to garner – before there were 3 billion documents competing for attention in the search engine databases.
Many marketers like to compare organic SEO to public relations because PR is so important to a company, yet the ROI on PR can sometimes be a challenge to measure. In both SEO and PR, marketers have the options of hiring internal staff, bringing in consultants, or using an outside agency. The same options apply for paid search marketing. However, often larger paid search campaigns are so large they may require some campaign optimization or bid management technology combined with internal or external expertise.
Search Engine marketing has already proven itself a valuable part of an overall integrated campaign, for both branders and direct marketers. All kinds of marketers can easily benefit from a dialogue with a searcher; whether that searcher is facing a crisis, is in need of information, or is ready to purchase. There are compelling reasons to put legitimate efforts behind organic SEO optimization, particularly efforts in site design, HTML formatting, copy optimization and server platform adjustments.
The Internet provides a great resource for a wide variety of web marketing and search engine optimization tools for website designers, webmasters and website marketers. SEO and SEM tools provide important and relevant information regarding your website’s performance, keywords and keyword placement, link popularity and search engine rankings in major engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Keyword analysis tools can read web pages you specify and generate reports on what words where used and the number of times these words where placed on each web page or pages.
Link count checker tools are used to allow webmasters and SEM experts to view the number of websites that link to particular URLs. These tools can measure the website’s link popularity by making queries to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN which in turn would display the results of the query.
Backlink checker tools are used by search engines to measure the importance of websites relative to one another. Reciprocal Linking is a way for websites to get these backlinks by trading links with each other. This type of tool is used to check that reciprocal linking is done properly.
Keyword density checker tools are used to check how many times (percentage) a keyword was placed on a web page. A keyword density of 2% or 3% is considered pretty good by the search engines. Higher percentages of keywords on a web page might be considered spamming by search engines. Prime locations for keywords are in Title Tags, Keyword Meta Tags, Description Meta Tags, Alt Tags for images and Header Tags.
Keyword traffic checkers is a SEO Tool that is used by webmasters to estimate some site traffic numbers that their website’s keywords may generate. An educated guess.
Meta tags generator tools makes it easy for webmasters to generate the Title Tag information, Description Tag information and the right Keywords to use for a given URL page or pages. Search engines use this Meta Tag information, which is a description of a web pages overall topic, to index the website’s pages.
A sitemap builder tool is critical for complete indexing of a website in search engines. A Sitemap is a MUST! This type of tool can create a ROR Sitemap for your website which should contain links to all web pages.
Link building tools can make a website’s ranking in search engines sky rocket. Quality links and related links meaning links that are similar to the business or category that the website represents. This type of tool will help webmasters find potential link partners.
Title tag checker tools can retrieve title tags from competitors’ external and internal links which then you can use to optimize your website pages to rank better on search engines.
By using these SEO and SEM tools you will be able to see a dramatic improvement in your website rankings.
