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search engine marketing tutorial

Search Engine Marketing 101 For Corporate Sites

July 22, 2020 by admin 1 Comment

When most people want to find something on the web, they use a search engine. Millions of searches are conducted every day on search engines such as google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, and many others.

Some people are looking for your website. So how do you capture people searching for what your site has to offer? Through techniques called search engine marketing (SEM).

This tutorial is foundational information for anyone looking to implement search engine marketing. This tutorial will also help you understand how the search engines work, what SEM is, and how it can help you get traffic.

What is a Search Engine?

All search engines start with a “search box”, which issometimes the main focus of the site, e.g. google.com, dmoz.org, altavista.com; sometimes the “search box” is just one feature of a portal site, e.g. yahoo.com, msn.com, netscape.com.

Search Engine Marketing 101 For Corporate Sites
Search Engine Marketing 101 For Corporate Sites

Just type in your search phrase and click the “search” button, and the search engine will return a listing of search engine result pages (SERPs). To generate SERPs the search engine compared your search phrase with information it has about various web sites and pages in its database and ranks them based on a “relevance” algorithm.

Search Engine Classes

Targeted audience, number of visitors, quality of search, and professionalism is what determines a search engine’s class. Each search engine typically targets specific audiences based on interest and location. World-class search engines look very professional, include virtually the entire web in their database, and return highly relevant search results quickly.

Most of us are familiar with the major general search engines; google.com, yahoo.com, msn.com. A general search engine includes all types of websites and as such are targeting a general audience. There are also the lesser-known 2nd tier general search engines; zeal.com,ask.com,whatyouseek.com. The primary difference is that 2nd tier engines are lesser-known and generate significantly less traffic.

There are also several non-general or targeted search engines that limit the types of websites they include in their database. Targeted search engines typically limit by location or by industry/content type or both.

Most large metro areas will have local search engines that list local businesses and other sites of interest to people in that area. Some are general and some are industry-specific, such as specifically listing restaurants or art galleries.

Many other targeted search engines list sites from any location but only if they contain specific types of content. Most webmasters are familiar with webmaster tools search engines such as; webmasterworld.com, hotscripts.com, flashkit.com and more. There are niche SEs for practically any industry and interest.

Search Engine Models

There are two fundamentally different types of search engine back ends: site directories and spidering search engines. Site directory databases are built by a person manually inputting data about websites. Most directories include a site’s url, title, and description in their database.

Some directories include more information, such as keywords, owner’s name, visitor rankings, and so on. Some directories will allow you to control your website’s information yourself others rely on editors that write the information to conform to the directory standards.

It is important to note that most directories include directory listings as an alterative to the search box for finding websites. A directory listing uses hierarchal groupings from general to specific to categorize a site.

Spidering search engines take a very different approach. They automate the updating of information in their database by using robots to continually read web pages. A search engine robot/spider/crawler acts much like a web browser, except that instead of a human looking at the web pages, the robot parses the page and adds the page’s content it’s database.

Many of the larger search engines will have both a directory and spidering search engine, e.g. yahoo.com, google.com, and allow visitors to select which they want to search. Note that many search engines do not have their own search technology and are contracting services from elsewhere.

For example, Google’s spider SE is their own, but their directory is and Open Directory; additionally aol.com and netscape.com both use Google’s spider SE for their results.

There are a few other search engine models of interest. There are some search engines that combine results from other engines such as dogpile.com and mamma.com. There are also search engines that add extra information to searches such as Amazon’s alexa.com, which uses Google’s backend but adds data from its search bar regarding tracking traffic to the site.

Getting In

One of the most important things to understand about the SE database models is how to get into their database and keep your listing updated. With a search directory, a submission needs to be done to provide the directory all the information needed for the listing.

It is generally recommended that this be done by hand, either by you or a person familiar with directory submissions. There are many submission tools available that advertise they automate the submission process. This may be fine for smaller directories but for the major directories, manual submissions are worth the time.

Not all search directories are free; many charge a one-time or annual fee for review. Many of the free search directories have little quality control. For free directories you may have to submit your site several times before being accepted.

There are three different methods for getting into spidering search engines; free site submission, paid inclusion and links from other sites. Virtually all spidering SEs offer a free site submission. For most, you simply enter your url into a form and submit.

Paid inclusion is normally not difficult, except for the credit card payment. For free site submission, there is no quality control. The SE may send a spider to your site in the next few weeks, months, or never.

Typically with paid inclusion you will get a guarantee that the page you submitted will be included within a short amount of time. The other standard way to get included is to have links to your website from other web pages that are already in the SEs database. The SE spiders are always crawling the web and will eventually follow those links to find your site.

Once you are in a search engine database, you might change your site and need the search engine to update their database. Each directory handles this differently; generally each database will have a form for you to submit a change request. Spidering search engines will eventually find the change and add your updates automatically.

Getting High Rankings

Getting into a search engine database is only the first step. Without other factors you will not rank in the top positions, a prerequisite for quality traffic. So how do you get top positions? You can pay for placement with sponsored links that is covered in the next section. To place well in the free, organic SERPs, you will need to perform search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is one of the most complicated aspects of web development. Each search engine uses a different algorithm, using hundreds of factors, that they are constantly changing, and they carefully guard their algorithm as trade secrets.

Thus no one outside of the search engines employ knows with 100% certainty the perfect way to optimize a site. However, many individuals called search engine optimizers have studied the art and derived set of techniques that have a track record for success.

In general, there are two areas to focus on for top rankings; on-page factors and linking. On-page factors mean placing your target keywords in the content of your site in the right places. The structure of and technologies used on your website also play a role in on-page factors. Linking, refers to how other website’s link to yours and how your site links internally.

Search Engine’s Marketing Offerings

Search engines in the early days of the web were focused solely on serving the visiting searcher. They worked to capture as much of the web as possible in their database and provide fast relevant searches. Many early website owners learned to reverse engineer the relevancy algorithms and to make their sites “search engine friendly” to get top rankings. They were the first search engine optimizers, manipulating the search engine’s natural or organic SERPs as a means of generating free web traffic.

Often times these optimized sites compromised the integrity of the SERPs and lowered the quality for the searcher. Search engines fought, and continue to fight, to maintain the quality of their results. Eventually, the search engines embraced the fact that they are an important means for marketing websites. Today most search engines offer an array of tools to balance website’s owners need to market while maintaining quality for the searcher.

You can generally break search engine marketing tools into free and for-pay. Realize these classifications are from the search engine’s point of view. Effort and expense is required to setup and maintain any search engine marketing campaign.

Organic rankings are still one of the most important ways to drive quality traffic. Search engines now seek to reward ethical, high-quality websites with top rankings and remove inappropriate “spam” websites.

While organic rankings can produce continual free traffic, it takes time from an experienced individual to achieve optimum results. Additionally, organic placement offers no guarantees, it generally takes months to get listed and can be unpredictable once listed.

Some search engines offer services that add more control to your organic campaign. Most of these services will list / update your site faster or will guarantee that all essential content is listed. For integrity reasons, no major search engine offers higher organic rankings for a fee.

Search Engine Marketing 101 For Corporate Sites
Search Engine Marketing 101 For Corporate Sites

If you need top rankings quickly, pay-per-positioning (PPP) is the most popular way to go. PPP rankings appear in normal organic SERPs but are usually designated as “sponsored listings”. PPP listings use a bidding process to rank sites.

If you are the top bidder, e.g. willing to pay the most per click on a given phrase, you will have a top placement. The 2nd highest bidder is two; the next is 3 and so on. While most PPP works using this model, some search engines offer modifications such as Google’s AdWords where bid price and click-through rates are both factors for positioning.

Search Engines have many other marketing tools, such as search specific banner ads; listings on affiliate sites and more.

Getting Started

The majority of websites have sub-optimal search engine marketing. Most sites have no effective search engine marketing and are continually missing out on valuable leads.

Many other websites are too aggressive, wasting money on low value traffic or harming the functionality of their site due to over optimization. Too many sites are even paying money and receiving no results because they have trusted unethical or inexperienced search engine optimizers.

All SEM campaigns should start with a strategic evaluation of SEM opportunities based on return on investment (ROI). You need to assess how much each lead is worth for each keyword phrase and determine which SEM tools will achieve the best ROI for the phrase.

You also have to decide how much you want to do in-house vs. retaining an expert. A qualified expert will typically produce better results faster, but the high expenses may destroy the ROI. Often it is best to work with an expert as a team, the expert to develop the strategy and internal staff to perform implementation and ongoing management.

Tom McCracken is the Director of LevelTen Design, a Dallas based e-media agency. He has over 14 years of experience in software engineering and marketing. He has developed solutions to improve custom service and communications for some of the worlds largest companies.

With an education in chemical engineering and economics from Johns Hopkins University, his background includes; web and software development, human factors engineering, project management, business strategy, marketing strategy, and electronic design.

Filed Under: Search Engines, SEO Guides Tagged With: search engine marketing can also be called what, search engine marketing examples, search engine marketing ppt, search engine marketing services, search engine marketing tools, search engine marketing tutorial, search engine optimization, types of search engine marketing

eMarketing Sabotage – Top 10 Steps To Kill Your Search Engine

July 21, 2020 by admin 3 Comments

We at America Web Works Search Engine find ourselves amazed at the number of effort people spend trying to fool or manipulate their positioning in search engines. People seem to focus on the shortcuts to success and NOT on their Web site or the true value their content provides to their prospects.

In the spirit of educating marketers about best practices,we present this list of ten things you can do to sabotageyour search engine marketing project in a “New York” second.

1. Invisible (Ghost) Text – Search Engine

You have kept a good secret! Your visitors might not have noticed, but all search engine crawlers have been trained to be on the lookout for this obvious technique, last fashionable circa 1997. The search engines may very well purge all your pages from their index due to deceptive practices.

eMarketing Sabotage - Top 10 Steps To Kill Your Search Engine Marketing Practices
eMarketing Sabotage – Top 10 Steps To Kill Your Search Engine Marketing Practices

And, if you are feeling really frisky, you can make this technique even more effective if the invisible text has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the page it sits within.

2. Frames Usage

Search engines are not “frame-friendly”. Once they encounter a pesky frame, they either stop flat in their tracks because the frame doesn’t give them anywhere else to go, or they locate the pages beyond the frames and point people to that locale – which won’t have the frames included with it.

There’s truly no need to use frames and make an attempt to justify it by believing it will improve the prospect’s experience.

If your prospects can’t uncover your site or they find slices and slivers of you, how much then have you actually assisted them?

3. Search Engine Why Be Fresh And Original?

Why try to be unique, it’s just too hard anyway? It sounds foolish, but it occurs quite often. If you find something real interest on another site, just burning a copy and slapping your links on the top does not make you a unique force on the Net.

And how much actual shopping sites selling the exact same discounted products are enough for the average Web? In my book, the more sites you mirror, the least effective you will become.

4. Chubby Web Pages (Obesity Kills)

Sites with lots of graphics, animation, Flash, and music depose many disruptive elements with the search engines. Not only can it confuse your prospects, who are looking for obvious information and links, but the search engines may also not feel you are very relevant because they cannot be sure what to make of your Web site.

If you have a site made up of nothing but heavy graphics and multimedia, not only will you give the search engines zero to index, you may also aggravate any prospect running with slower connection speed. In nothing else, at the least, use alt-tags to explain images for text browsers, the hearing impaired, and search engines.

5. Redirects, Redirects, And More Redirects

You may be using “redirects” within your Web pages to trackclicks for advertising and also to pull together informationabout your site visitors. Your Web pages may be indexed,but you may not rank well at all. The search engines may notbe able to see the correlation that exist between your Webpages because the redirect code often blocks their path,unlike direct text linkage.

6. Lengthy URL’s

Dynamic (ever-changing) e-commerce and shopping Web sitesthat use parameters and their session ID’s often manifestthese difficult URL’s nicely.

If your Web site has lengthy URL’s sprinkled with questionmarks, percentage signs, Session ID’s, and at least threeparameters, you’re degrading your hopes for search enginesuperiority.

Lengthy URL’s do not look very attractive to individualssearching and the site URL’s contain calls to variousdatabases.

Leading the way for the search crawler directly into yourdatabase may quite possibly be a sure-fire way to send themspidering elsewhere.

7. Forgotten about your No Index Tag and Robots.txt?

Have you created a plan to keep all those nasty search botsout? Do you have a robots.txt file living on the root ofyour site? Does this file contain the following:

User-agent: *disallow /

Or does your Web property have a Meta-tag:

Be extra nice to your Webmaster. He or she may depart fromyour company in the future and leave this little monsterbehind for you to find at the end of a needlessly expensiveinvestigation into why the search engines will not make nicewith your Web site.

If you are using the special robots protocol, you will notwant to forget to remove them altogether if you are goinglive from a beta testing process.

8. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages (also know as jump pages and bridge pages) and anything that is created specifically for a search engine and does not contain more than valuable content or products your prospect, is not an effective search marketing tool.

If you’re not providing true content, the search engineswill discover this and may penalize your entire online site. If you’ve jammed yourself into this hole, you’ll probablyneed to return back to start with a new domain name.

9. Identical Meta-Tags And Titles

You worried over every single unique page of the Webproperty while developing it, but you didn’t spend a lot ofconcern that each page should be tagged (or classified) thatway.

Imagine walking into your public library where every singlebook had the exact same title. What better way to tell asearch bot to “take a hike” than showing them that all ofyour content is exactly the same. You will most likely seefewer of your Web pages indexed and much less traffic thanyou might otherwise.

Here’s a quick checklist to consider for your Meta-Tags andTitles:

  • * Do they deliver a “call to action”?
  • * Do they use relevant keywords and phrases?
  • * Is your “Title” less than 80 characters?
  • * Do they accurately describe what the page is about?
  • * Are these consistent with the page?
  • Free Meta-Tag Builder:
    http://www.americawebworks.com/metatagplus/
  • (Be sure to bookmark that link!)
eMarketing Sabotage - Top 10 Steps To Kill Your Search Engine Marketing Practices
eMarketing Sabotage – Top 10 Steps To Kill Your Search Engine Marketing Practices

10. Linking Networks

Did you find a service that’s offering to link thousands ofother Web sites to you today? Taking part in these programsmay effectively indicate to the search engines that youreally do not want their valuable traffic. The quality ofthese link pages as well as their overall content “value” toa human visitor is very low.

Most search engines do come together in agreement and canseverely penalize accordingly. Sites that get marked aslink spammers, may be briskly informed that they should finda new domain name and begin all over again.

I advise you to take these lessons in “eMarketing Sabotage”for what they are, guidelines to help you operate your goode-business practice free and clear of the many pitfalls andmistakes of other marketers and improve on your own level ofsuccess in conjunction with search engines strategies.

Soon, with a sound plan, a bit of smart work and a solidattention-to-detail approach, your Web pages may rankhighest among today’s top search engine results.

Happy Marketing!

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: benefits of digital marketing, business marketing, how to do digital marketing, search engine marketing examples, search engine marketing platforms, search engine marketing ppt, search engine marketing services, search engine marketing steps, search engine marketing tutorial, sem vs seo, types of digital marketing, types of search engine marketing

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