Learning Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Wikipedia defines Search Engine Marketing as a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

I could go into the technicalities of SEM, algorithms, robots, etc. However, if you’re reading this article, you probably aren’t interested in me stuffing a bunch of technical terms down your throat. You would rather learn about search engine marketing and how it can bring you more business.

I chose this topic today based on a couple of conversations I recently had with new clients.

One of our clients had embarked on a small ad campaign with Yahoo before coming to us. He mentioned that when he was spending the money on Yahoo, the traffic to his site was much higher. When I asked how many sales he garnered from the advertising, he replied that he didn’t know. Website traffic and conversions to sales are two completely different things, with the latter obviously being more important. It’s crucial to keep track of your ROI (Return on Investment), if you are going to invest in online advertising. Make sure that you have the tools within your company-whether it’s your own database for tracking sales, or another form of tracking system-before you spend your first marketing dollar.

Another conversation I had with a client involved a Google Adwords campaign. He was bidding using every keyword under the sun. He had a huge CTR (Click Through Rate), but again, nobody was buying. At the end of the day, his budget was gone and he didn’t have anything to show for it besides lots of traffic and an empty bank account. Until I explained to him that he was paying for people to come to his site and quickly leave, he didn’t “get it”. Having the right keywords in your campaign and your ad copy, that are relevant to your product or service, will get you qualified click through to your site. You don’t want people to click on your ad, only to find that your site doesn’t offer the information they were looking for, and leave immediately. That will cost you wasted dollars each and every time they do that.

My advice to our clients is to, first and foremost, invest time on SEO. As long as you are engaging in honest practices, and not trying to fool the “Big 3″, the benefits will far outweigh the time you spend. If you can afford to hire a reputable firm, all the better! Please be aware that there are self-professed “SEO Experts”, who claim they can get you to the top of the SERPs, guaranteed. Any company representative who spews this line at you is most likely just out to take your money. Check them out thoroughly. Conduct an online search on their company, and don’t just stop at the first few pages of the results-dig deep to discover if they are reputable or not. Check with the Better Business Bureau or other consumer watchdog organization. Reputable firms won’t guarantee top placement, but they will give you realistic projections of how they can help you improve your placement results.

Until you really have all the pieces in place, it’s best not to engage in a pay per click campaign. Remember that it takes testing, monitoring and tweaking, as well as a significant amount of your time, before you will see any benefits.

I’ll start with my own experience:

A few years ago, the company I worked for ventured into a rather large PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign. We hired an expert, had all the tracking tools in place and launched a campaign to knock out our competition and drive traffic to our site; paying close attention to our sales funnel and expecting to convert our “browsers” into “buyers”. In addition to our PPC campaigns, we also hired a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm to help us with the natural results. Natural results are the result of traffic coming to your site outside of paid links directing it in. It should be noted that we had all the puzzle pieces in place and spent time on the following:

1. Analyzing the results from the analytics

2. A/B testing of different landing pages

3. Closely monitoring the PPC campaigns

4. Adjusting our ad copy and landing pages based on our conversion rate

We hired top firms for both the “paid” and “natural” campaigns, as well as an expert to oversee both of the campaigns. Without getting into the numbers here, (and believe me they were big), the end result was as follows:

1. We spent a large amount of money getting traffic to our website via the pay campaigns. The increased traffic did result in increased sales, however – the results made each sale a VERY expensive one, and not really worth the money that was spent on the marketing campaign. In short, our ROI (Return On Investment) was in bad shape.

2. We spent 80% less on the SEO campaign, which took longer, but garnered results that are still driving traffic to the website to this day.

In the end, we spent a ton of money getting traffic to our website which did not result in sales, and we learned several valuable lessons. In addition, we did suspect throughout our campaigns several instances of fraudulent PPC activity. Unethical companies will engage in this practice by hiring offshore companies at ridiculously low rates to click on their competitors’ ads. These companies use various IP addresses to avoid detection. The idea is to exhaust a competitor’s budget before legitimate click through and potential sales can occur. When we reported suspected PPC fraud, some clicks were refunded via ad credits (Yahoo!) and some could not be proven and were not refunded (Google). The best advice I have for companies on a small budget is to work on your natural search results via search engine optimization, and use various other forms of advertising, such as placing a print ad, and perhaps a nice banner ad (where you pay per month, not per click) on a relevant site. Later, when your marketing budget has grown, you can branch out into other forms of media, such as local radio or television.
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SEO Strategies – The Importance of Testing

One thing that makes you stand out from the crowd is the testing that you do in your SEO strategies. Testing is one of those things which can be the difference between someone making it really big versus just kicking along when they are trying to drive traffic to a new domain.

Think about it this way. If you can increase your conversions by 2% and you’re only doing 2%, it’s like getting twice as much traffic. So it’s worth looking at. I’m not a testing freak, but it is worth considering. Be curious and have a look behind the scenes to see what is actually happening. You’d be surprised quite often how easy it is to get an improvement just by checking something out. It could be as easy as installing Heat Map tracking onto your site just to know where people are clicking.

Now you might be wondering, what do you use for split tests?

I mostly just use Google Website Optimizer or a Link Rotator.

Google has great tools that I use in my SEO strategies.

Now you might be wondering, with some of the other things you do, like you’ve got a lot of different link building mechanisms, for all of what you do, where would you identify the biggest bang for your buck? Of course link diversity is important and you don’t want to just hone into one particular thing. I’m curious to know, of all the things you’ve tested, where do you notice the biggest bang for your buck?

In terms of conversions, it’s pretty hard to beat forum signatures and blog comments. They’re very targeted buyers, they are super targeted. You can control where you place your link to a high degree. Here’s a tip. You use the search tool in a form and search for exactly the problem that your blog post solves. Posting that thread you’ll get quite a lot of conversions. Also you’re posting from a keyword related site.

So you get the good inbound link. With forums, we’ve done a little bit of forum commenting and also blog commenting as well. Now you might be wondering, what are the sorts of tips you have?

We weren’t seeing a huge amount of traction for how much we were spending. Sometimes you would make a post, this was more so on blog commenting and then that blog comment may not have got accepted. You might be wondering, is that something you’re doing yourself or are you outsourcing?

Yes, I do that myself. When it comes to my primary blogs, I post the comments, I post the content, I do the forum posting in my SEO strategies. You have a lot of control and influence on that. When it comes to article distribution and buying links, or submitting videos you don’t need to be involved with that so much because it’s not going to change the process.

Wherever you need to exert control that is where your own work will be necessary. Otherwise, don’t make life hard for yourself, and outsource as many tasks as is feasible.
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Search Engine Optimization Basics

Search engine optimization is a process in which full analysis of a web site is done from search engine perspective. Following things are analyzed -

Target segment (Niche) of the website Keyword users type belonging to that target segment Density of those keywords in the content of the site Does site theme supports those keywords General site navigation and text used in anchor text linking Competition in that target segment Resources used by the competitors Other sites linking to that site Age of the site

After analysis of these factors a report is prepared which discusses the problems a site is facing with respect to the above factors. How much optimization efforts are required for the site to come up in search engine ranking. How much time it would take before actual results are seen. A ethical solution would be to help site overcome the natural shortcomings arisen due to ignorance or improper knowledge of search engine functioning.

Ethical search engine optimization solution would require time, lot of hard work on the part of seo and patience to wait until actual results are achieved. The success achieved through ethical seo efforts are long term gains and display stability. In comparison unethical seo efforts show quick results but are very damaging in long term.

Search engine optimization makes a website search engine friendly and ethical search engine optimization is best for sustained good ranking. Before starting any search engine optimization effort it is necessary that one should be fully aware of the targeted Keywords and phrases.
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The SEM Answers Are in Asking the Right Questions

Are you marketing your website with your hands tied behind your back and your monitor shut off? If you don’t know the answers to a few basic questions about your website, you might as well be. How do you know how much you will spend on marketing next month or next year? Whether you are spending time or money, you need to know how much it will take and where to best invest. You need to know what is working. Marketing is based on results.

Check your web stats.

• Do you know how many people visited your site yesterday? How does this compare to one year ago? How does the weekly traffic graph look for the last 12 months? What is your monthly growth rate? Can you see any spikes in traffic that you know the cause of?

• What is the average retention time for visitors? How does this compare week to week for the last year? What is affecting retention time?

• What keywords or phrases are bringing you the most traffic? What percentage of your total traffic is each one bringing you? How does each keyword or phrase rank in organic search results?

• Are you tracking conversion rates for every ad?

If you have seen spikes in website traffic for your site and you know what caused them (for example: a press release, publicity, a pay per click campaign,) why are you not doing the same thing again?

Marketing is not just about your results. Search for the experts that publish or post their marketing results. Marketing is cause and effect and you must know the cause to be successful.
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SEO Software Reviews

Most internet experts agree that the most crucial part of any successful internet business is totally dependent on your ability to automate your tasks to increase productivity.

In the operation of an internet site or many sites there are mundane and repetitive tasks that bog down the most effective marketing business person. Software programs are many and varied in terms of what tasks they can or cannot add to your bottom line through saving time and automating routine and repetitive work.

There are free tools such as Google Keyword Adwords Tool that you can use to ensure you are on the right track which gives you searches for the past including within one month. Keyword research is the holy grail of websites or blogs and without it many fall flat instead of obtaining high rankings for their sites in the search engines.

The main objective in a successful website is to obtain high rank in the number one search engine which is and always will be Google.com. Some products such as keyword research software helps automate the task of finding the right keywords, including similarly related keywords. There are various programs which can be called search engine optimizing software and most are related to keyword research.

Keyword Research Software Brief

A basic tool that all SEO experts tend to use is the Google Keyword Tool which is free. There are other to help you determine what it is, that people are looking to buy. There are keyword rank checkers that give you valuable insight on how your content is ranked by the search engines. Other tools are keyword suggestion tools but Google provides this technically in its Google Keyword Tool for AdWords. There are also link analysis tools to determine which links are bringing you the most traffic that automate what takes hours of research in this area.

Traffic Analyzer Software Digest

Traffic analyzing involves finding out where your traffic is coming from and the demographics of your audience. These programs will review your traffic and give you updates on trends on your site, and you can identify some areas you need to improve. But all the analysis in the world does not guarantee to improve your website’s rank and again they are time consumers. Traffic analyzers in search engine optimizing offers a unique look at more detail as to where you readers are coming from and from that information you can determine how to reach more readers in an area, or a state or a country. You do need software that will analyze data quickly and efficiently to succeed in business.

Article Submission Software Summary

There are a few programs that automate submitting to directories which is a mundane task however the return on your investment of time and money is not very high. You can outsource this work but when you have numerous sites that can be expensive. There are several programs such as WEB CEO however they are limited in functionality to keyword research, page analysis, submit your domain to search engines, analyze incoming links and so on. Initially when you create a site there is a learning curve to this program and it is a complicated tool to master for those new to internet marketing. However this may over a long period of time assist you in getting rank the methodology is very time consuming for most entrepreneurs.

The New Evolution in Internet Software Automation

There is a product on the market that creatively gains high page rank and automates back links to your site. This is especially beneficial for getting a site indexed by the search engines. The automation of mundane tasks allows the SEO entrepreneur to progress to product creation, dominating a niche quickly and it is shockingly effective. This product called Evolution II by Brute Force and is based on adding quality backlinks harmonized with the efficient use of RSS feeds, semantic keywords and rss feed aggregators. The software automates and streamlines all the tasks of promoting your website to get a good rank for your sites in Google-its as simple to use as it is to say-total evolutionary automation. For more information on search engine software.
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The Most Effective And Basic SEO Tools

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Briefly put, SEO can be defined as all the techniques that are used to gain more notice and index for your site on all the important search engines like MSN, Yahoo or Google.

What is the importance of SEO?

The foremost way in which people locate websites is through search engines, so obtaining a higher ranking in your keywords (usually the first page or 1-10 in the engine) is an excellent way to pull traffic to your site. When you have a quality ranking, the investment is worth making, and it is a lot like “free” promotion 24/7/365.

What is the way of becoming SEO friendly?

I am not exaggerating when I say that the methods of SEO are literally countless. However, here let me share a few of the chief elements of making it to the top order.

Domain age – Search engines give a lot of preference to a seasoned site – a site that has been working for many years and has a beneficial output for the browsers.

Clean, relevant, new content – You need to ensure that the content of your site is always fresh and is regularly updated. Both the search engines and your visitors will like the novelty.

No Flash – It is a wonderful multimedia device but Flash is generally not favored for SEO, the text and content within the Flash piece cannot be identified by search engines, and hence it cannot be utilized into your SEO progress. A major fault is possessing a flash introduction, because a flash introduction page stands as an obstacle between the main page and the remaining content that lies inside your site.

Meta tags – Meta tags are nothing but invisible tags that are implemented by search engines to categorize your site content.

Heading tags – Heading tags (h1) should be put on the headline or most essential and relevant element of your page. These tags also need to be written on the keywords which you think users will be looking for that will lead to your site.

Site maps – Site maps is a link by link breakdown of your site. They assist search engine “spiders” maneuver through your site and index each separate page.

SEO :What you should avoid

Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing is jam packing your content with your chief keywords to such an extent that your content holds no meaning at all.

Invisible content – This is something that you don’t intend your visitors to see but have used to keyword-stuff your page. It will quickly place you on the wrong side of a search engine.

Too many h1 tags

Link farms – Link farms are simply individual pages with plenty of links to other sites.

Going overboard with any of the “what not to do” can lead to your site being “sandboxed” which will set aside your site from the search engine completely. Being “sandboxed” may last years or months, or even forever.

How long will it take to have a good ranking?

SEO, as a practice, is very time-dependent. Even though you will implement only above-board SEO techniques, you should not hope to see results for at least a few months .

Your investment is bound to pay off

Although the correct ROI of your SEO services is literally incalculable because of its longish timeframe, the unanimous opinion of experts is that SEO is the most money saving marketing tool if practiced in the right manner.
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Real Estate SEO for Beginners

The world of real estate is going through dramatic change and I don’t mean the current market upheavals caused by the change from a Seller’s market to a Buyer’s market.

Independent of price level there will always be buying and selling of homes going on. But the way people search for and find homes is in the middle of a dramatic change. The Internet is the great equalizer but also the great differentiator.

People searching online are not aware of your achievements, everybody is equal at first. If your website does not offer the design and services people appreciate they will not stay long enough to find out. This is where you can differentiate yourself.

But design and functionality are a secondary issue to the problem of how to get found in the first place. Use the analogy of websites being online business cards. New business cards are deposited not at the top of the pile but at the very bottom. Customers are picking up business cards from the top of the pile. SEO or search engine optimization deals with efforts to move ones business cards further up the pile so that customers can find one’s site through popular search engines.

So you have a new website. So you basically just had your business cards printed but nobody knows how to find them. Or even more dramatic you don’t even know if somebody is picking up your business cards and you don’t know if your business cards are in the big pile yet.

I would define SEO as the efforts to purposefully move ones website to be placed higher on the results page in response to a search query at a range of search engines.

But there are thousands of search engines out there. True. But all but 3 are irrelevant to your optimization efforts. Google, Yahoo and MSN control about 98% of all searches performed on the Internet. Focus on the three big search engines and the rest will take care of itself.

What is there to optimize? The aim is to be found by people searching for things that you offer on your website. When people search they do this textually by querying a search term or phrase. For you to optimize your site you first have to understand for which keywords or key phrases you want to be found. As I am practicing real estate in Aspen, Colorado and appropriate search term could be “Aspen Real Estate”.

Make sure you repeat your keywords and phrases on your homepage. Make the most important key phrase a headline and type it in a bold font.

It is important to understand that search engines are automated computer systems programmed by humans to evaluate the webs content without human interference. This means that search results are based on what is called a computer algorithm. This is basically a set of instructions for the computer on how to evaluate certain criteria and translate the results into a sequence of importance. Most important website first, least important website last.

The art and science of Search Engine Optimization is to try to understand what the search engines are looking for in a good site and then giving the search engine just that. The google search engine algorithm probably looks at hundreds of different criteria. It is so complex that not even the engineers inside google know the whole picture. Well you might say, how should none google employees then know what to do?

Basically the most important fundamentals of what makes a good websites are known. Google for example uses a patented mathematical concept they called “Page Rank” at the root of their systems. Links are seen as votes. The more links are pointing to one website the more important that website must be. The more important the website is that votes for another website the more weight that vote caries.

So, try to get people to link to your website. It is important to know that links from website that have the same topic as your website seem to be more important than links from website that do not fit the subject. Links from other real estate related website are more important to my website then links from websites promoting toys.

Search engines like content rich websites. The more pages with useful content the better. Blogs are a great way to accumulate great on-topic content over a period of time. This is all the more important as search engines like website that have fresh content on a regular basis.

DMOZ.org is a human compiled directory of websites. Read their instructions carefully and submit your website to a relevant category. Yahoo and Google use this directory and it helps to be listed.

Generate a site map and place the xml file on your web server. A site map is basically a long list containing all your web pages in a format that is readable by computer programs employed by search engines to browse the web. These programs are called “bots” or “spiders”. This will help the search engines to find all the pages on your website. Remember, the more web pages the search engine knows about the better for you.

Search engines cannot read certain content. Graphical content is one such thing. If your site consists of mainly pictures the search engine will not understand what your site is about and therefore will not offer it as a result of a search. Make sure your site is text rich.

Real Estate website can have pages for the different subdivisions in the area serviced. Write a blog on the property of the week. Incorporate a section of “Frequently Asked Questions”. Write about yourself and give people a bio on you. Explain the buying and selling process. Offer sales statistics. The list goes on.

Get a program Like “Advanced Web Ranking” to search the search engines for search results containing your keywords. Optimization is fun when you start to see results. But manually looking for your website in search results is labor intensive and a good job for an automated program.

Read web forums and a couple of books on SEO once you are past the basics. The field is constantly evolving and there us tons more to learn.
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How to Get Search Engine Rankings

The following article is going to give you a few tips to building high search engine rankings. High search engine rankings are very important to internet marketers, if you wish for swarms of free traffic coming to your website on an ongoing basis. How do we to get sought after and coveted high ranking on the search engines?

Building backlinks is the number one greatest tool in acquiring high search rankings. If you do not know what backlinks are, they’re links to your site from another site. You can get back links from a variety of sources. The fastest way is to outsource a link building project. I always go through getafreelancer.com.

Backlinks are what affects your search engine rankings the most is because if someone decides to put a link to your site on theirs, it’s the equivalent to a popularity vote. The search engines pick up on this. The more popular your website is, the higher they will rank you. Be very careful of websites have the power to decrease your website’s page rank if they link to you. There sites which will help you find out about sites which might hurt your ranking. You may consider looking at these sites.

Optimizing your website for targeted keywords is very important as well. The search engines need to know what your site is about in order to display it to searchers. The only way they can do this is by the words that are placed throughout your site. Once you have a list of targeted, and researched keywords place them strategically within your sites and/or blogs. Some places you may need to place the keywords are; Meta tags, the title tag, anchor tags, header tags, bold tags, the URL itself, and webpage names should include the most important keywords, your content should be keyword rich, especially at the top and bottom of the sites

In order for the search engine bots to favor you above other a lot of the other websites, your site needs to have a lot of keyword rich content. Going for roughly 20 pages of article sized content about your niche is a great rule of thumb. What I attempt to do is make a list of 20 of the most targeted keywords that we want our site optimized for. Then, write a keyword-optimized article for each keyword.

Utilize these tips and you should be delighted by your results. We do advocate that all articles will land you on the front page of the search engines. However, past experience has shown us that consistent and diligent application of the previous tips will greatly improve our page rank. Getting a high page ranking is not an easy task, a lot of the time. We have to work on it several times a week, and really need to post something of value, that people want and/or need on a daily basis. My suggestion, start by doing the best you are able to do. Taking into consideration the amount of time, skills/knowledge you have.

My thing is this. Regardless of where your at in the internet search engine world, start from where you are at. Thank you for reading.
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Google Page Rank Explained

How to improve your page rank

Google’s Page rank is usually a concept which is misunderstood, yet the concept is relatively easy to understand. It’s Google’s method of indexing all content and websites based on how important it feels they are in the internet community. If you can understand how it works, you’ll know how to boost your own rankings. It is page based, not site based.

To rank your page, Google looks the amount of links there are from other websites. The more links there are, the higher your page rank.

However, all links are not considered equal. Pages with a high page rank are more powerful allies than those with low page rank.

As an example, receiving a link from a PR5 page is of more benefit than 20 links from pages with no page rank. It’s the quality of the links which is important not how many you have..

There is an equation for working out how much PR value you’ll get from a link, but that is not something you should bother about – just get those PR4 and up links.

The main factors which determine the Page rank of a page are:

The amount of page rank coming in to your page. Page rank can not only come from external sites linking to your page, but also from other pages within your own site linking back to your page. You must manage” the flow of these links so that they go back your most important pages. Don’t link back to your “contact us” page, link back to the page you want to rank highly for. The more pages there are in your website, the higher the page rank. As discussed, a key factor is the number of external sites which link back to you.

Remember these points when you are constructing your site and concentrate on getting those quality links back from quality websites. One way of doing this is to put useful and relevant information on your site so that people actually want to link back to you. This is why the authority sites have such high PR.

You can submit articles to article directories, submit your site to site directories, blogs, buying etc.

While purchased links may be more powerful and easier than links you get by normal methods, Google will penalize you if they find out you are buying links. A better idea is to seek links from websites that are relevant to your own.

Make sure the page that is linking to you has been indexed by Google, If the page is not indexed, the search engines won’t find the link, and you won’t get any credit for it.

You can get indexed links by setting up a webpage which is outside of your main site. It need not be an actual site you build, of course, just leave a comment (with a link) on a blog, or on a Twitter profile.

Reciprocal links are not as powerful as one-way links. Try to receive one-way links from other websites wherever you can.
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SEM – Blogging Basics You Must Know

If you don’t already know, blogging should be a vital part of your Internet marketing campaign. Blogs are websites so they are also indexed by search engines which means you can build quality inbound links. You can use blog search engines or the Google blog search feature to locate blogs pertinent to your subject. Apply the same principles of keywords and SEO to blogging.

Visit blogs and rate them as major or minor media blogger. Develop relationships by communicating with other bloggers. Keep track of your contacts they become quite valuable for building inbound links and relationships. Keeping your communications professional and informative and you will develop a reputation of trust and gain acceptance.

Leave well thought comments that pertain to the subject matter if you want to be approved. Many blogs allow you to post a link in the comment section or your profile. Do not use the blogs to market your product or service.

You can start your own blog with a URL and website CMS (Content Management System) such as the free WordPress program. WordPress has many plug-ins such as calendars to keep your blog organized and have multiple categories. Keep your blog simple, organized and attractive. Target your audience and keep the site from becoming cluttered with advertising. Monitor who is posting on your blog, you could develop important contacts.

You can use spam filters and approval settings to keep the garbage comments off your blog.

Make sure blog postings and comments are relevant with your theme or topic.
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Monthly Archives: November 2011