Sunday, August 1, 2010

Engine Marketing

Today, companies constantly clamor for attention at every parking bench, in every religious magazine, and on every shirt. As Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of Advertising Age, stated: "Advertisers will not be satisfied until their put their mark on every blade of grass." Successful companies and entrepreneurs must make their name known; they must participate in search engine marketing.

Why Is Search Engine Marketing Important?

AOL© is right. America is online. According to 2004 Nielson NetRatings, approximately three-quarters of Americans have internet home access. A 2008 Cone Business study found that 60% of Americans use social media, and that 93% of those users believe a company should have an online presence. As evidenced by the prevalence of popular search engines, companies cannot afford to ignore the online market.

Search Engine Optimization

In order to display relevant listings to consumers, search engines create algorithms, such as Google's PageRank, to classify web pages. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tried-and-true method for escaping the pits of fifth-tier listings and rocketing onto the front page. It is affordable, and properly used, has an impressive ROI (Return on Investment). While specifics are unknown, SEO researchers have pinpointed the primary factors for SEO success.

1) Keywords. Keywords are search terms. When selecting keywords, eliminate broad-based keywords; rather, use pertinent terms. For quite specific results, use long-tail (4 plus words) keyword phrases. Primary keywords should appear with the first paragraph of an article, and secondary keywords, within the first 100 words. Keywords should also appear in the title, headers and subheaders.

2) Links. Links are how web crawlers find and rank web pages. There are three types of links: reciprocal, which pair two web pages; multi-way, which partner three or more; and one-way, which sends one web page to many others - and may be costly. To obtain links, craft relationships with other online businesses, and consider affiliate marketing.

Paid Search Listings

Sites such as Google© and Amazon.com© sponsor paid search listings, where corporations can buy advertisement space and pay the hosts using one of two methods: PPC (pay per click)/CPC (cost per click), or CPA (cost per action), which only requires clients to pay if website visitors commit a certain action (e.g. buy a product). Using PPC/CPC advertisements may increase website traffic, but CPA advertisements lead to higher conversion rates and reduce non-buying visitors.

Customer-Centric Website Building

Customer-centric website building constructs a website with the consumer in mind. Color themes, font choices, site navigability, customer service options and purchasing interfaces all affect the customer experience. Stoney deGeyter, in "Seven Steps to Improving Conversion Rates," instructs, "Don't try to be all things to all people, but instead ... meet the vast majority of your visitor's needs."

Web personalization is the hottest new trend in consumer-centric marketing. It uses visitor demographic information keys (gender, age, interests) to alter website features by visitor. Web personalization has been shown to increase the traffic-conversion rate from an average 2.8% by 70%!

Ditch the magazines, shirts and park benches. Start search engine marketing.

Used In SEO

Link building is one of the most effective techniques used in SEO or search engine optimization. According to many SEO experts, link building is one of the oldest techniques used in SEO and it will still be the most effective technique because of its diversity.

Many professionals have pointed out that most link building techniques used in SEO were adopted from other forms of Internet marketing, including article marketing, press releases, blogging, as well as PPC and other paid techniques used in SEM (search engine marketing).

Because of its diversity, many professionals such as those from SEO Philippines companies have categorized these techniques to determine its main use in link building. These are organic link buildings techniques and artificial link building techniques. So what are these?

Different types of link building techniques

Organic link building

Organic link building or also known as link bait is a technique used in link building which makes its target viewers to link to their website due to many reasons, such as information, news, humor, tools, widgets, and more particularly with unique content. According to many SEO Philippines experts, this is a very powerful technique if done right. Organic link building include:

Blogging: By blogging information or other unique content, viewers would mostly post a link on their own blog or website.

Article marketing: Similar to blogging, making news and other unique content would normally hook viewers and link to this page.

Social bookmarking and networking: Bookmarking sites such as Digg or social networking sites such as Facebook are popular ways to get a lot of fans and followers which will allow more people to link to a website.

Unique content: Unique content alone is enough to hook viewers to create links pointing to this content.

Artificial link building

Artificial link building is a technique involving manual collection of links compared to organic link building which naturally grows overtime. According to many SEO Philippines specialists, techniques mostly used in this link building method include:

Blog commenting: One of the most widely used techniques in today’s artificial link building techniques.

Forum signature: Forum signatures are also popular ways to get a link, though not as popularly used in today’s modern SEO trends.

Social bookmarking and networking: Aside from organic, this is also a popular way to get a lot of links.

Article submission: Other than article marketing, articles can also generate a link which is the reason why many SEO companies hire their own writers to create articles for link building.

Artificial Link

What is link building? Link building is a technique widely used as an Internet marketing strategy to improve the relevance of a website in search engine result pages or SERPS. This technique is also known as one of the main strategy used in SEO or search engine optimization.

Link building involves a number of techniques and methods, and these techniques are categorized between two different techniques known as organic or natural link building techniques and artificial link building techniques.

Organic link building

Organic or natural link building techniques are those methods which involves the natural growth of links to a website without having to do any actual link building. According to many SEO Philippines experts, these techniques are also known as link baits. If done right, it can be a very powerful tool in SEO and link building.

Social bookmarking and networking sites

One of the most effective means used in link building today are social bookmarking and social networking. Social bookmarking mostly involves the use of bookmarking sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon to create artificial links.

However, this technique is also known as a type of natural link building because it can also attract people to link to your site, particularly if they liked your news and voted heavily on it. Similar to social bookmarking, social networking works the same way too, by creating popularity through social networking sites such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.

Blogging

A very straight forward way to get a lot of natural links is starting a blog in which people in your niche would likely link to. Creating unique blog posts and content is one way to get a lot of attention in the market, particularly when people would start linking on it and make news about this special blog.

Free tools and tutorials

Another popular way to get a lot of quality links is to give them free tools which they could use for their own purposes. Free video tutorials are also popular, and most likely link to your website and spread the word.

Artificial link building

Compared to natural link building, artificial link building techniques mostly involves the use of techniques and methods which can be controlled by specialists. This involves the use of blog comments, forum signatures, article submission, and link exchange.

Link exchange

One of the oldest type of link building techniques used in today’s market. It involves making contact to different websites of the same niche and asking if they could link their website to your own, but in exchange, you would also have to link your website to them. According ot many SEO Philippines experts, though not as popular compared in the past, many are still using this technique.

Blog commenting

Other than blogging, blog commenting is also a popular way to gain links by living a comment with link in a blog or any publicly accessible discussion websites such as guesbooks and wikis. However, compared in the past, this technique is slowly loosing its effectiveness particularly because of the nofollow tag that Google have started, which rendered most of these comments ineffective to many search engines.