Also known as search engine optimization or positioning, search engine
marketing is the process of making a web page or site score well in
the search engine rankings. Search engines can bring a significant amount
of pre-qualified and highly targeted traffic to your web site, if your
site is properly optimized for the search phrases that people are using
to look for web sites like yours.
There are three important areas of search engine marketing: proper
web site optimization, submission to the various search engines, and
maintenance.
Proper optimization for search engines means that there must be search
phrase rich textual content on web pages that is informational in nature
and related to the theme of your web site. So your site should have
content on the web site about the main topic of your site, not something
that's totally unrelated. While search engines can and will add web
sites with primarily graphics, Flash, Java applets and other multimedia,
they can't index the content contained in those popular applications.
Without textual content on your web site, your site will never gain
those coveted high search engine rankings.
Once your web site is properly optimized for the search engines with
the appropriate search phrases, your web site must be submitted to those
search engines. It should be obvious that a web site probably won't
get high rankings in a search engine if it has never been submitted
to the search engines. That's not to say that it can't happen. Many
engines send out spiders to search the Internet for web sites. Many
web sites get listed that were never submitted to the engine intentionally.
However, it has been reported that the Internet is approaching or has
already passed the one billion page mark. So if your web site is not
intentionally submitted to the search engines it may be quite a while
before it gets indexed by the search engines, no matter how well the
site has been optimized.
Many people think that the search engine marketing process is complete
once the site has been optimized for the appropriate keywords and submitted
to the search engines. Not true. The search engines must be monitored
to make sure that the site gets added to the search engines' databases,
and to find out the ranking of the web site. Sometimes, for various
reasons, a web site does not get added to the search engines. In this
case, the site must be resubmitted.
Also, search engine marketing does not end once the site has been added
to the search engines' databases and gets a favorable ranking. Search
engine marketing is an ongoing process. With AltaVista reporting that
they receive more than one million submissions a day, this makes for
a volatile and ever-changing environment. Rankings can change from month
to month, and that's why you need maintenance, recurring verification
and resubmission as a part of your search engine marketing program.
Finally, search engine marketing is not something that you can start,
stop, and restart as your cash flow goes up and down. If you are hiring
a search engine marketing firm, once you stop paying for their search
engine marketing services, they stop all aspects of the service. No
more submissions. No more monitoring the rankings. No more adjusting
pages to get higher rankings. Once that happens, your pages start to
fall in rank. When you decide to restart search engine marketing services,
most everything has to be done over.
The traffic and corresponding sales won't happen overnight. Search
engine marketing normally takes several months to a year before you
see profitable results and it may not be cheap, but done correctly,
search engine marketing can bring you highly targeted, pre-qualified
visitors that are looking for what you have to sell them. That often
converts into sales and satisfied customers, as long as you stick with
the program for the long haul.
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