Search Engine Marketing

Steps to identify Keywords:

When selecting keywords, you need to find keywords that have a combination of characteristics: Relevant (used by customers to search for businesses like yours), have relatively low competition and high search volume. To find keywords that have a combination of these characteristics, you need to use both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

8. Link Popularity focuses on three things:

i. Quantity of links - Number of pages linking to you. ii. Quality of links - Popularity of pages linked to you (High Google PageRank) iii. Relevance of Links - How close are the keywords on your site to the ones on the site linking to your site.

Link Popularity (Inbound links)

1. Popularized by Google's founders 2. Their PhD thesis centered around the most effective way to rank results on a search engine. 3. Before them others used other algorithms including: sponsorship, frequency of search, meta tag keywords, etc. 4. Google believes that ranking should be based on how important that page is for a specific keyword. 5. Their thesis - the more important a site, the more likely that other websites will link to it (popularity). 6. The more popular you are, the higher you should be ranked during a search. 7. The focus is on inbound links (links coming to your site) and not outbound links (links going out of your site).

Tips for Selecting Keywords:

1. Should be based on the words that your target customers will use to search for companies like yours. 2. Avoid industry jargons and technical terms because customers do not search using industry jargons. For example, although customers looking to purchase a car search for the term "used cars", businesses in the auto industry were all competing to rank high on the words "pre-owned cars", since that is how businesses in the industry call used cars. This led to them having search marketing campaigns that did not work well and it took them a while to understand why. 3. Decide whether you are looking for branded keywords, non-branded keywords, or both. Branded keywords include the name of the company and/or product. This normally targets people who already know about the company. Non-branded keywords do not include the name of the brand /company or product. These keywords are usually used when a company is targeting people who do not know about the company but are looking for products that are similar to what the company provides. 4. Using the wrong keywords will lead you to attract the wrong crowd. 5. Recommend using phrases 3 or more words instead of one word since they are less competitive and describe niche better. a. Example "used college textbooks" is better than "books" b. Use long tail keywords. These are relatively longer phrases that are more detailed. 6. Avoid trying to rank high on a single word. For example, the word book will be so difficult to rank high on since it is so competitive. Try instead to be more specific and pick a long tailed keyword such as "used college textbooks". This is because this will be less difficult to rank high on and will also get you more targeted results that increase the probability that the person will buy your product. 7. Visit competitors who rank high on search engines. Learn about their keywords

Keywords are the key to search engine marketing because:

1. They are used by search engine crawlers to determine your place and positioning on a search engine 2. Existing or potential customers search for your products on search engines using keywords.

iii. Related Keywords/phrases:

10 - 12 related keywords/phrases (support words/phrases): These are words that are related to the primary and secondary keywords. They include synonyms, different combinations of the primary and secondary keywords. They can also include more specific products and services that cannot be added to the primary or secondary keywords. These are words that you will have in your meta tags. Also, they are words that you should have scattered in your website.

Things that you can do to improve your Link Popularity or PageRank:

11. Check search engines for those who appear highest when you search for important keywords you want to rank high on and offer to exchange links with them. 12. Check PageRank tools to determine who ranks higher than you for your targeted keywords and approach them to exchange links. You can check your page rank on some of the sites listed below. 13. Submit your site to Wikipedia. Create a profile with information about your site and do not make it sound like a sales pitch. Wikipedia can help you improve the relevance, quality and quantity of links to your site. 14. Exchange links with resource sites, that is; sites that provide valuable content such as tips and tutorials in the industry that you belong in. 15. Create a page with content that is not about selling products. Such content should be information that is helpful to people in your industry or potential/current customers of yours. E.g. tutorials, tips, how to do things, etc. Websites are more likely to link to a page with helpful content than to a page that just sells things.

How websites are ranked?

Google uses a combination of link popularity and Search engine optimization to rank websites.

4.Tags

Information inserted into the header (code) of a webpage to provide crawlers with information about website and content. i. Other than title tags, tag information is not displayed on website ii. Title Tags: Just like a book has a title, every website has a title. This is a very important factor in determining how high and the keywords that you will rank high on. Make sure you include your primary keywords in your title. 1. Header at top of web page (in top bar) 2. Used to describe page when placed in "favorites" 3. It is used as the header of your search engine results 4. Check for word limit 5. In your title tag, make sure that you include primary and secondary keywords. Do not repeat keywords too many times in a title otherwise it could be considered SPAM) iii. Meta description: 1. Meta descriptions (Limited number of words - differs by Search Engine) 2. Should be a couple of full sentences (depending on word limits) that describes what the website or web page is about. 3. Make sure you include primary and secondary keywords. If possible, include them a couple of times each. Also, try to include related keywords. Do not repeat keywords too many times otherwise it could be considered SPAM) 4. Influences keyword ranking on search engines 5. Used as description on search engines 6. Important since it helps convince searchers to click on link on website 7. Include call to action 8. If you don't write one, search engine crawler will create one that you do may not like 9. Should be consistent with keywords used 10. Check search engines for limit to number of words used iv. Meta Keywords: 1. Ignored by some search engines because web designers abused it in the past 2. Identify 10 to 12 keywords including your keywords and related keywords. 3. Watch limit to number of keywords 4. Do not spam.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Things to focus on: 1. Structure:

Makes it easy for crawler to crawl on website. Crawlers are text based and can only read text. Here are a few structural issues to consider when developing an SEO campaign: a. Minimize use of flash and dynamic web languages like CGI, Php, etc b. No frames c. Use alternative tags (popularly known as alt tags) to describe images d. Site Map: This is a webpage that has links to all the pages in your website. It makes it easy for users of your website to easily navigate your site. In SEO, creating a site map makes it easy for the search engine crawlers to easily crawl all your web pages. Creating a site map is therefore an important part of any SEO effort.

Types of Search Engines: Directories/Powered by Human Beings

On these sites, instead of searching in a box, you click on links and drill down until you find what you want. One drop down menu usually has links to various thing which will eventually bring you closer to your specified result.

Paid Search Engines Google Adwords and Sponsored Ads:

Paid text based advertisements that appear on the side of search results on Google and its partner websites like AOL, Ask.com, earthlink, etc.

Things to focus on: URL

Place Keywords in your URL (Web address). The keywords can be in your main URL and also to the URLs of individual pages on your site.

Steps to identify Keywords:

Qualitative: 1. Put yourself in your customer's shoes to come up with all of the possible keywords that the customer might use to search for what you offer. 2. Make sure you ask your client or potential customers what words they will use to search for the product or services your company provides. 3. Do not rely only on what you think your customer will type in a search engine. 4. Find out how their customers have already been searching for the website - you can look at web logs and statistics tools 5. Ask friends, customers, etc how they would search for your products/services 6. Research customer sites 7. Research Competitor sites 8. Conduct research/focus groups, etc

Steps to identify Keywords:

Quantitative: 1. Use Google's Free Keyword Planning tool (or similar tools). The tool is actually created to help companies select keywords for their paid/sponsored ads on Google. However, you can also use it to help you select keywords for your SEO. Use the Keyword planner to: a. Confirm that the words you selected in the qualitative process above are the right ones. b. Filter the keywords that you develop from the processes above c. Identify new and additional additional keywords d. Identify the keywords that no one searches for e. Identify the keywords that are too competitive f. Identify the most effective Keywords

Search Engine Marketing

Refers to all activities involved in using a search engine as a marketing tool. Includes: Search engine optimization, link popularity, ad words and other forms of search engine advertising.

Link Popularity

Refers to the number of inbound links(links from other websites to your website) Google uses it to determine how popular your website is on the web. If your a popular website you should rank higher than less popular sites.

Search Results

Regular Results or organic results usually appear in the middle of the page. You cannot pay to have you ads rank high on the organic section. It is free. Everything here is based on SEO and Link Popularity. The ones that appear at the top of the page and on the side are paid results referred to as Ad words or sponsored/paid ads. You have to pay to be here and where you rank is based on where you pay. Your ad words are pay per click meaning you only pay google when someone clicks on you ad. Yo do not pay them when someone view your ad.

Types of Search Engines Robots/Crawlers

The search engine is automated and everything from gathering data to the ranking of websites is automated and run by software. They are named after the software that crawls through the entire web gathering data from websites to help determine how to rank them on search engines. Crawler based websites usually have a very clean webpage with only one box where you can type in search terms you are searching for. Eg Google or Bing

Types of Search Engines: Specialist Search engine

These are search engines that focus on specific topics or industry. blogsearchengine.com

Types of Search Engines metasearch engines

These search engines aggregate search reults from multiple search engines. They used to be very popular before Google, since search reults were not very effective. These companies would search multiple search engines and provide you with the results to help you get the best results. EG Dogpile.com

4. Website Content/text (copywriting):

Things to consider when using the content of your website to help you rank high on search engines. i. Frequency of keywords: How frequently keywords are used on the website. Do not over do it (SPAM) ii. Alt tags: Use alt tags to describe pictures using keywords. iii. Keyword Density: The frequency of the keywords as a percentage of all the words on the web page iv. Positioning of keywords: How important the keywords are positioned on the webpage. 1. How high the keyword is on the page 2. How it is formatted - bold, heading, underline, etc. 3. Are your keywords included in your links? 4. Are your keywords included in your menus?

Keyword Density Analyzer:

This analyzer looks at the different keywords on a site and then looks at the number of words as a percentage of the total number of words on that page. For example, if a webpage has 100 words and one of the words appears 10 times on that page, then the density of that keyword is 10/100 or 10%. When a crawler visits your site, they will look at the words with the highest density and those are the words that it will place you under when it goes to dump information into Google's database.

Parts of Search Engines: 1. Website Interface:

This is the home page where you visit www.google.com type in your keywords and receive your results.

Parts of Search Engines: 2. Spider/Crawler:

This part of the search engine is hidden to the user of the search engine. It works in the back end. Every second, Google sends out crawlers to visit all the websites in the world (Billions of sites). They continuously crawl through the entire world wide web and visit sites. Their goal is to visit websites, determine what each website or webpage is about, determine what keywords the site is associated with, and finally transfers the information it gathers to the index.

Local Search Engine Marketing

This refers to a business using a search engine to target a geographic regions. Search engines are used by people from all over the world so to maximize the efficiency of their search engine marketing efforts, businesses that target only certain geographic regions can use search engines to target only those regions. Since Google is the largest search engine, we will focus on Google. The other search engines tend to follow Google, so they all have features and approaches similar to Google.

3. Anchor Text:

This refers to text that appears in links on your website. You have to make sure that your keywords appear in your anchor text. For example: The words "click here" are the anchor text in the link click here . Another example is: Click here for the best Pizza in Hamden, CT The anchor text in this situation is "click here for the best pizza in Hamden CT". Since it contains keywords, it will help a Pizza restaurant site rank higher on a search engine than if it just said "click here".

Social Search:

This refers to the use of search tools on social media sites to search for a product, name, company, friend, etc. Because of the popularity of social media, an increasing amount of people use the search tools on those sites and as such makes it important to figure out what you can do on your social media page to help you rank high during social search. Although each social media site is different, you can rank high on social searches by using the same principles of search engine optimization on social media sites such as Youtube. Make sure you have your keywords in your pages, in your tags, etc.

Types of Search Engines Hybrid/Mixed

This refers to websites that are both crawlers and directory based. Yahoo and MSN

i. Primary Keyword/Phrase

This should be a single phrase, usually 3 or more words long. It is the keyword or phrase that you believe customers will most likely use to search for your company or products. The primary key phrase is the phrase that you should use the most on your website. It should be in your title tag, meta tag, meta description, and should be used as often as you can in your website.

9. PageRank:

This was named after Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google. It is a number developed by Google that measures a website's importance on the web. The highest rank is 10 and the lowest is 1. Google uses a website's link popularity to determine its PageRank.

Parts of Search Engines: 3. Index/Database/Catalog:

When you go on a search engine and type in a keyword, Google does not go and search the world wide web. It searches its own database that contains billions of data that the crawlers gathered and created as they crawl through the web. As the crawler crawls each website, it gathers information and places that information in the database/index. So Google searches its own database and presents results from its database. By so doing, it is able to speed up its search and also provide us with more accurate results than previous search engines.

ii. Secondary keywords/phrases:

You should have 1-3 secondary key phrases. This should be the second most used phrase(s) on your website. It should be tied to your primary key phrase and should be determined based on what your customers will be using to search for your company's products and services.

Impact of social media on search engines:

Your activities on social media sites can help you rank high on search engines. For example, Facebook's public pages can appear on search engines. Also, your Youtube videos can appear in Google's search results. So make sure you have your keywords in your social media pages to ensure that you rank high in relation to those words. Also, links from your social media pages can help you with your link popularity.

Ranking High on Search Engines:

a crawler will crawl your website, grade it, and place it in the search engine database. When someone searches for the database, the search engine software goes into the database and reveals them to the searcher with the page with the highest grade ranking first, and the one with the lowest can rank as low as number 1 million.

Search Engine SPAM - Do not SPAM

a. DO NOT load meta tags and website with keywords with the sole purpose of ranking high. b. DO NOT use same color as website background to load keywords unto website c. Do NOT use Link farms to help you rank high on a search engine. Link farms are sites that create links to other sites with the sole purpose of helping those sites rank high.

Things that you can do to improve your Link Popularity or PageRank: 10. Submit your sites to Internet directories like Yahoo and Open Directory (Dmoz.org) to your site.

a. Those sites have high PageRanks and as a result are seen as high quality sites. b. If you get listed on the right section of the directory which is relevant to the keyword you want to rank high on, that will help with the relevance part of your PageRank score. c. It is another website listing to you so it will add to your quantity score. d. Finally, the search engine crawlers frequently crawl the large directories and from there they move to the websites listed on those directories. Being listed on those directories will help the crawlers discover your site and also get crawled more frequently.

Keywords

refer to the words or phrases that potential customers use to search on search engines. Although we refer to them as keywords, most people search using phrases instead of single words. So when we use the word keyword, we are referring to both a word or phrase that someone uses to search on a search engine.

Search engine Optimization(SEO)

refers to the efforts made to optimize a website in such a way that it will rank high on search engines.