3 Strategic Principles of Search Engine Marketing
By Jinger Jarrett
Search engine marketing isn”t just about optimizing your website for the search engines. Search engine marketing is a complete marketing strategy including search engine optimization, as well as marketing with pay per click.
Although pay per click is optional, if you want to market using the search engines, you need to develop a complete and ongoing strategy for ranking well. You need to give constant attention to your search engine marketing efforts. This means creating a marketing plan to market in the search engines and analyzing the results.
These three principles will help you get started:
1. Do your keyword research.
Keyword research goes far beyond just finding keywords to describe your topic. You need to search for keywords to optimize your website, as well as write other promotional content like articles. Finding the right keywords is also important. You don”t want to optimize for keywords no one is looking for.
The best way to find the right keywords to optimize your website is start with keyword tools and do a comparison of the words you find. Compare the number of searches to the amount of competition. Putting a particular keyword phrase in quotes and searching for it in the search engines will tell you how many sites are optimized for a specific keyword phrase.
This will help you choose the right keyword phrases for your site. Use longer keyword phrases when optimizing your site. This is because those who search using longer keyword phrases are looking for solutions. What you offer on your site is more likely to solve visitors” problems.
2. Submit to the major search engines manually.
Although some search engine marketers will tell you to wait for the major search engines to find you, there are so many web pages and sites on the internet now that search engine spiders may never find you, or it may take months for them to find you.
The way around this is to do your submissions manually. Google is especially good at indexing sites quickly provided you create a sitemap. A sitemap is simply a file that lists all of the links on your site in a format that is more accessible to search engine spiders.
Eighty percent of your search engine traffic will come from the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. With Google and Yahoo, you need to sign up for an account, but it’’s free. Both offer some form of statistics to help you find out if your site is being indexed or not. It’’s worth it to submit manually.
3. Use linking to make your site relevant.
Linking is a strategy where you build back links to your websites. It’’s like a referral system. The more back links you have pointing back to your site, the higher your site will rank.
You don”t want to get links from just anywhere though. You want links that are relevant to the content of your website.
To find relevant link partners, search for sites that are related to yours and ask for a link exchange. Look for directories related to your topic and submit your site there. Write articles on your topic and submit them to article directories. Build an affiliate program using affiliate program management scripts that include your domain name in the link.
Link building is an ongoing process, and it should be something you are doing all of the time, even if you only build one backlink per day.
Continue to add content to your website. Your ultimate goal is to provide relevant content, as well as related products and/or services that solve your visitors” problems. Then you will make the sale.
About The Author
Like these tips? Then check out my internet marketing blog for more free tips, strategies, and tools to help you make more money from your marketing. Sign up for my free internet marketing teleseminar.
Jinger Jarrett is the author of “Internet Marketing for Free: The GUIDE,” available on Amazon.
