Beginner’s guide to Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing claims to be a set of techniques, which allows promotion of your website in a way that visitors stream into your site, almost in a seamless manner. If the credentials of Search Engine Marketing are to be believed, they ought to be something people should invest a lot of time on. After all, any asset on the Internet wants one thing for sure – Traffic and more traffic.
More than 96% of webmasters on the Internet want incremental traffic to their website and in huge volumes. This statistic is enough proof of the fact that SEM is something any individual would love to learn more about.
If you are associated with the Internet in some form of the other, some concepts of SEM may be easy for you to understand. Some of them though may make no sense to you when you hear them first. Nevertheless, we have summarized some key concepts for your easy understanding.
• Black Hat techniques – Black Hat techniques are illegal SEM techniques that promise quick traffic to a website, but could also run you the risk of getting banned by Google. Once that happens, it could be a serious question on the credibility of your website.
• White Hat techniques – Any SEM guy working to get traffic to a website would love to have the traffic for good. This obviously warrants the use of techniques that are more suited to a website from a long run perspective. And that is where White hat techniques come into play. Techniques like tagging, adding descriptions to the web-page, content optimization, directory submissions and others form a part of White hat techniques.
• Social Networking – Some years ago, social networking was considered to be a platform where people could meet and chat with each other. In the recent past though, a lot of Internet Marketers have realized the gold-mine potential of social networking to benefit their business. One of the biggest benefits of social networking is in the ROI (Returns on Investment).
Here is an example illustrating the benefit – Assume you have a contact list of 1000 people on a social networking site like Facebook and you wish to launch a product, which caters to the needs of most people in the 1000 strong list. The chances or percentage of people buying your product would be as high as about 30-40%.
That is a high enough percentage or a conversion ratio for any SEM technique!
The flipside of this though is you need to have a laser-focused contact list on social networking sites. You may get to building one, but that would take time and a lot of effort.
• Search engines – These are the behemoths of Internet Marketing. Any individual who wishes to know about a certain subject gets into the search engines, types some keywords and gets the required results. Search engines like Google.com and Yahoo.com are ranking at the top in Alexa rankings, which goes to show that they are the ones most frequently visited by people.
Here’s what the search engines do – They send spiders or crawlers who crawl the whole of the Internet for finding content according to the keywords supplied by the visitor. Search engines also do the rather complex function of assigning Quality scores or Page ranks to the web-pages, after considering a lot of factors.
• Directories – These are the Online Yellow Pages, if you are referring to Business Directories. And Article Directories make up the content database on the Internet. Both these forms of directories are different in structure and functionalities.
While business directories offer firms and Internet businesses to get listed with a slew of other businesses, content or article directories allow people to publish their content on their platforms. These articles can then be read by people who desire to seek information on a specific subject.
Both business and article directories are considered excellent means of generating back-links to your website.
• Forums – These are platforms where you could find a topic of your choice and also find how people react to a certain subject. If used properly, forums could be an excellent method of asking people to get to your website. To use forums effectively, you need to ensure that your comments on a specific post make sense to the entire thread.
Remember – People will only click on your website if they find you adding something worthwhile to the discussion, else they would at best ignore your website and your post.
• Blogging – It is no secret by now that Google and other search engines place a high amount of importance on fresh and unique content. And one of the best ways you could accomplish that is by Blogging. Get an account with Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and you would be able to upload your content in absolutely no time at all.
The biggest benefit of Blogging is the easy content-management mechanism on offer. Within no time, you would be able to upload your content on the Internet and visitors will be able to see it.
• Link Building – When you are a new business on the Internet and desire to establish your name in the market, one of the easiest ways to go about is to tie-up with reputed companies in your niche. You don’t have to build a JV with them! Just exchange links with them and you will see the popularity of your site soaring in no time.
Not to mention – The quality score of your web-pages will also get a major boost.
And many more – You will find that Search Engine Marketing has so much to talk about that we could fall short of words. But in terms of effectiveness and using the techniques to the best effect, the methods and concepts explained above should be a good starting point for you in SEM.
