SEO Ranking Authority Foundation

Tag Archives: Search Engine Marketing

How To Unleash The Power Of SEO



The lifeblood of any website is to be “found” by web users everywhere. Most Internet users find sites through search engines, whether it be Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other. So how does a website achieve high rankings on these search engines? The first step is to unleash the power of search engine optimization (SEO).

The first step is to optimize your site with unique keywords, write good fresh content, and create lasting SEO copy. In order for a search engine to find your site, you need to develop clear and relevant keywords that users will search. Do some research and discover how people are finding your site. Check the number of searches for particular keywords in the last month, six months and year. You can get help by using tools like WordTracker. Good keywords can increase your site’s ranking.

Once you have several keywords, use one or two of them in your content, copy and off-pages. Write interesting, newsworthy articles that appeal to your target market. If you have good content, people will find you, but do not rely on search engines alone. SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) go hand-in-hand. If you really want your homepage found use off-pages such as article directories, Digg, Del.ic.ious, StumbleUpon, and blogs for your content. SEM allows you to create more links to your homepage, which means more searchable material for your site. You must keep writing at least once a week and promote your article with SEM. Do not expect an influx of traffic because you wrote one really good article. Granted, one article can produce a lot of traffic but you need to keep your content fresh. Add and edit your articles on a regular basis.

A common marketing mistake is to create a fancy website that has a lot of graphics, maybe some flash and other distracting items. This will not keep viewers for very long. Content is vital, graphics are not. Your site design should have a branded look and should be easy to navigate. Do not hide your navigation buttons or move them from top to bottom, left to right. Pick a place and keep them there. Also, put searchable links to your site. Select relevant and healthy links to use to increase your site’s equity. The more searchable links you have, the higher SE spiders will rank your page and the more likely other businesses will reciprocate, putting your link on their sites.

Finally, know what you want your SEO to do for you. SEO is meant to drive traffic to your site in the hopes that those visitors will become buyers. However, understanding that there is no SEO rank guarantee is vital to the health of your website and your budget. If your SEO expert promised to get your site to the top of a ranking list in one week, you bought a scam. Maintaining a high rank is like being a star athlete, you need to keep training and working hard to be the best and defend your championship. This means that SEO is not just a one stop shop. It is the train that drives traffic, but not the tracks. If you want your business to keep moving forward, you need to continue building tracks for it to run.
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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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A Winning Team – Display Ads, SEM, and PPC




Staying ahead of the curve is the key to survival in business. Developing the right digital marketing strategies, combined with the current state of the economy can be difficult. It is important to spend ads dollars, but what is the best way to spend them?

The advent of search advertising makes it easy for advertising agencies to track your, return on advertising spend, or ROAS. Search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing have grown by leaps and bounds. Many companies have utilized SEM and PPC as standalone strategies, but when combined with a digital advertising campaign, those strategies will be stronger.

Previously, display advertising had a high cost that was difficult to track. Finding proper placement, where benefits could be readily seen was difficult. Thanks to rapid development, display advertising can now be tracked similarly to SEM and PPC. This allows companies to utilize the branding aspects of display advertising into their advertising arsenal.

Combining Your Efforts

To effectively reach all potential clients a combination of SEM, PPC, and display advertising is needed. It may seem SEM and PPC are all that is necessary, but display advertising fills the void SEM and PPC leave.

1. The market for search advertising is very competitive. Popular keywords are very expensive because there are more than 1 million companies using search ads

2. Search ads do not allow for branding. These ads are not visually stimulating and make it difficult for a single business to stand apart.

3. Search advertising only works when users are actually on search engines. As important as search engines are to a company, people only search so long before they go to individual sites. Display advertising allows you to target specific sites.

Does It Work?

The Online Publishers Association released a study in June titled, “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online”. The study assessed 80 of the largest consumer websites. The results were staggering.

1 One in five users conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites

2 Users spent approximately 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages

3 Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands

4 Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

Combining SEM, PPC, and display advertising is the way to stay ahead of the competition. SEM and PPC are easy to track, but thanks to recent improvements display ads can be tracked in similar ways. This allows companies to utilize the branding aspects of display advertising into their advertising arsenal. Most businesses use one or the other, but not both. This one-two combo adds a powerful punch to your marketing strategy. Using all of these tools will give you the highest ROAS, and that is what everyone wants and needs.
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The Definition of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)




Search engine marketing is very similar to search engine optimisation, well the only technical variation between the two terms in reality is the time periods in which they were the buzz term for the industry and the way and amount of money spent on each one. Search engine marketing tends to talk about large campaigns whereas SEO can apply to the smallest and grandest of marketing schemes.

When you say search engine marketing you should be aware this term incorporates things such as PPC campaigns which of course aren’t part of SEO as PPC does not help you to rank any better in the engines unless you get natural links through the growth in traffic. SEM is a term which encompasses all of the SEO and the related forms of advertising to do with search engines. So basically search engine marketing is SEO and more. This is why many SEO companies wont run your AdSense of affiliate campaigns for you because this is the realm of search engine marketing. Some definitions place the meaning of SEM simply as a term for PPC and affiliate marketing whereas these are incorrect interpretations you should be made aware than SEM will sometimes be referred to in this manner.

Taking the latter definition, the narrow one, we can see that SEM is a useful but costly way to improve your websites traffic and as PPC is notorious for its abused payment system this just adds more negativity to this interpretation of search engine marketing, perhaps this is why SEO companies refer to themselves as SEO and not SEM in the current market or perhaps it is to do with the interpretation that SEM is expensive and only displays short term results.

The theory that SEM only gives short term results, and again we’re going with the narrow definition here, is perhaps fairly well founded. The problem is of course due to the costs involved in PPC it is not often a cost effective long term method, while at 1st you may receive a boom in new customers that will not continue indefinitely. And when this happens you have to re-evaluate how much you should spend on SEM whereas the affiliate side of things is normally a safe bet as the affiliates only earn a share of the profits. So with affiliates you can’t really loose. So whenever you speak of SEM make sure that you and the person you are talking to have the same definition of what SEM entails otherwise things may get confusing.
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The Real Reason Why People Spend Millions of Dollars in Search Engine Marketing (SEM)




Search engines are becoming extremely vital to a person’s (or a business) online success. The use of the internet is expanding and growing rapidly as time goes on. As a result, more people are finding it essential to apply Internet marketing.

It used to be the case where you could just get by with word-of-mouth advertising. Nowadays however, it is insufficient to just get the word out for your products or services. It is important to realize that turning to Internet marketing is one of the best ways for you to thrive online while reaping massive profits. There is a whole spectrum of market out there that needs to see your business and the different products and services that you offer.

By having top search rankings (on Google for example), you are essentially positioning your website or business in front of millions of online visitors. And the more visitors you have, the more sales you make. Simple logic really.

Because of this, more people are focusing their efforts on Search Engine Marketing. While search engine optimization is a popular means of getting ranked highly on search engines, SEM is a way of paying for your placement on the search results. This can be quite expensive at times, but it is usually worthwhile because it will get you the visibility that your business needs.

Search engine marketing (SEM) works through various ways. There are certain methods, such as pay per click, also known as PPC, which charges you each time a person goes to your web site from the search engine results. There is also search engine inclusion, which is where you pay to have your business listed in the search results. You will normally show on the top or down the side, in the sponsored section, when you go this route.

SEM has revolutionized the way businesses attain customers. People are realizing this and turning to Internet marketing to make sure that they are seen when they need to be seen. The fact of the matter is that your prospects are already out there looking for the product or service that you have to offer.

So the question is: Will your website appear in front of their eyes first? There is a huge chunk of money out there to be made if you take the time to learn more about Internet marketing and how it can multiply your profits.

If you are keen in learning Internet marketing to make money online, you can start here and claim your entirely free special report.
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