Search Engine Marketing
The Search Engines are the applications that bring interested users into your site, also known as incoming traffic. When somebody is looking for a service or a product that is similar to what you offer, your page should be in the Result Pages that it returns and, the higher your page is located (high rank), the bigger is the probability for your page to be accessed by a potential customer, it is also considered as an indicator for your website's authority. Search Engines have become an important tool for a web user to browse the Internet, giving reason for the Search Engine Marketing to grow, they are the doors to the internet (users find information they need via search engines), are goal oriented (the search engines try to answer only with webpages that are relevant to your query), they may bring potential customers into your site. Search Engine Marketing considers a series of factors that can add visibility, relevance and high indexing to your website.
Search Engine Marketing can be divided into two basic parts: Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Arvertising.
The Search Engine Optimization is the baseline in a eMarketing strategy. Usually when talking about SEO, it refers to the "white" methods that consist of tuning and estimation of the parameters set by Search Engines, in order to get high ranking, leading to a better user experience. While the "black" methods are dubious, meant to achieve high rancking, being ocasionally blocked or black-listed by Search Engines.
The goal of the Search Engine Optimization is improving visibility in search engines via natural (unpaid) results. It is about the principles applied when structuring the information on the website. It is a set of actions that take part at each level when bilding your site which help it to improve the correct logical structure, the links that must be adequate to the content they lead to, which is one of the concepts of building Search Engines friendly sites. Only with a correct design, an accurate list of keywords and building links to your page, menus, content management, image videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure resulting a website be found in the natural results of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) . It involves proper key words and key phrases, optimising the content of the key phrases, link popularity and others. If done properly it will have a good indexing and ranking of your site to a search engine. SEO can ensure long term results for you Internet business activity though, it might take a while for the results to be seen.
SEO developement steps:
- The structure of a website should be defined before its building. You need to make a research in the search engines about the keywords/phrases that can be relevant to the content. Find keywords, their synonyms and their most common misspellings that will describe the links, paragraphs, pages, from your website, deciding what content will be displayed on which page.
- The texting plays an important role when your site is being crawled. Trendy flash animations are generally unrecognisable by the crawlers, include pdf only when they can't be avoided, any scripts are passed by - crawlers are text-based.
- Content optimisation brings a considerable weight in the SEO of your website. Arrange your content in a specified hierarchy, use descriptions for the images included, descriptive filenames, make sure the header is relevant to everything that it comprises (files, text, images).
- Links are the crawler's reason of being. When a crawler is launched, it starts from a random domain name and follows its links. Incoming links are the ones that are bringing trafic to your site (also outgoing links are important especially in ranking, when a publication has many trusted reference links, it becomes trusted as well). Links are validating the relevance of your sites, they are signals of trust. Gaining links to your website may need time, involving other marketing tactics like PR, creating tools and documents that users may find useful, games, widgets, etc.
- To which Search Engine you sould be friendly? Google has about 55-60% from all the searches on the web however, sometimes when tracking the trafic for some webpages there are records that the users that were driven from MSN, or Yahoo, spent more time and saw more pages on these websites. So, when thinking about SEO it better shouldn't be done only according to only a search engine, failing so towards to other search engines, or the users that might come from these.
- Emerging trends. Due to the exponentially increasing data, search engines change their algorithms, becoming more complex. A webmaster should take into account factors like personalisation, localisation, adapting to how search engine will index, measure them and how the contextualised information will be presented.
- Regular update is important for a website maintenance. Frequency of updates depends on the topic and content. Any site requires a fresh (and not just new), right in time posted content. Search engines love it, and users might like.
The other technique of the Search Engine Marketing is the paid search, usually using Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). PPC Advertising it is an option where you pay only for each click on your advert. PPC is used by mostly all Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Some other similar payed search are the Cost Per Mille (thousand from Latin), which is the amount paid for every 1000 viewers of your advertisement, Cost Per Action when you pay for a certain action done by the user, Impression – paying each time your advert is shown, Pay For Inclusion – paying for to be included in search engine's data base. When choosing a PPC advertising you have to define the goals and what the users will do after they click on your advertisement( download, buy or get informed), making sure that the landing page will be relevant to their search to have a maximum possible conversion.
Google implements the Pay Per Click advertising with the Google AdWords Advertising, in Yahoo this implementation is the AdCenter. So how does all this work? Together with our team you choose a set of key words that are relative to your business activity, and choose an amount of money you are willing to pay for this click advert, which varies for every key words you choose. The results of a payed search, usually show up on the right side of Search Engine Results Page (SERP), if the query matches any of your key words. The paid results are sorted in a decreasing order , basicly with the amount payed for the matched key words but there are also other features taken in consideration, like the relevance of the keyword with the search term, relevance of the landing page with the search term. When choosing PPC campaign for your business activity it is important to pay attention to the bidding amount and the setting you choose for to get a high return of investment, you will need an expert consultation for to do it the best way. There are many parameters to be taken in consideration for your campaign to be an efficient one.
Once the Search Engines are bringing traffic into your site, there are cases when our clients aren't willing to pay for the traffic they don't address to. For example your internet business activity is addressed only to the market in Europe. The PPC system has the geo tagging option. So your advert will be shown up only when a potential client is looking for your service/product in the region you act.
Conclusions and benefits
SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms can change, and there are no guarantees of stability, which requires accurate alteration, updating and maintenance. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic