What Is Search Engine Marketing?What is this search engine marketing anyways? Search engine marketing has to do with search engine optimization or SEO and it is a very valuable undertaking to many webmasters and owners of web sites. Search engine marketing has a very rudimentary definition: It is the process of getting more directed traffic (visitors) to a web site by using methods to get the site in the top search query results from a major search engine. By top search query results we mean that if someone types a search phrase in Google or Yahoo and is looking for sites that provide your product or service, then yours will be on the first page of the results. If the search engine marketing has been done right then this will be true. The main concept behind this search engine marketing is that visitors are more likely to come to your site if it is listed first. And, if more visitors come to your site then there is more likelihood of making a sale. The science behind search engine marketing seems easy but in reality it takes months of work to get your site ranked. Ranking of your site in search engine marketing is handled by a software process called a search engine crawler (a.k.a, searchbot or search spider). It has this name because it will systematically crawl the internet, find your website, and give it a classification based on an algorithm that calculates its estimated popularity. The human part of search engine marketing is the SEO consultant who understands how to organize your website so that the crawler can easily classify it. A properly-classified site will get a better ranking. Search engine marketing strategy will be focused on optimum or popular keyword selection for you website. The idea here in search engine marketing strategy is to make sure that the keyword occurs as close to the top of the page as possible as search engine crawlers do not scan the entire page. A good example is if you sell blue widgets on your website then you might want content with the word "blue widgets" to occur as much as possible on first page and towards the top of the page. The idea is to get the search engine crawler to find your page, determine that it is a site for selling blue widgets and classify it appropriately. Part of optimization for search engine marketing is to make sure that the text on your website is actually text like you would type into notepad. Don't use images or Flash graphics for your keywords because the search engine crawlers cannot read that format. Remember, search engine crawlers do not have "eyes" the way we do. They have to extract keywords and compare them with index dictionaries. A match will mean a hit but they cannot do it with a set of eyes. Search engine marketing using search engine optimization also uses what is known as the back link to rank a website's popularity. If a link to your website is placed on another website with a product or service related to yours then search engine marketing through search engine optimization loves this. An example of two related websites would be a website for sports league that links to a team sports store. |