So what is, Search Engine Marketing?

In this article, I’ll cover some of the basic principles of search engine marketing, and introduce yourself to the steps necessary for getting your site found on the search engines. So let’s start with the non-technical definition. In the book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site (2nd Edition) they describe it this way:

“When a searcher types a word into Google, finds your home page, and clicks through to your site, you have attracted a visitor from a search site. If you do nothing at all, searchers will still find your site—sometimes. To maximize the number of searchers coming to your site, however, you must take specific actions to attract visitors to your site from search sites. That’s search marketing.”

Getting your website found by others will be your number one marketing initiative from the day you open until the day you close your business. Without traffic you can’t have sales, but this traffic has to be targeted to your online niche, and your online store has to be developed in such a way that any traffic that comes to your website, converts to sales. Traffic is useless if there is no revenue tied to it.

Gone are the days of submitting your site to a search engine, waiting a little bit, and then reaping the benefits from your new site visitors. Those days have been gone for years. Now, it is relatively easy to be listed, but extremely difficult to be listed in a way that converts to any significant traffic. At least initially. It will take constant tweaking and testing to work your way up the search engine index towards the top. From personal experience, the more defined your niche is, and the more detailed your search keywords are, the more likely you are to appear towards the top of the search engines result page. But nothing is guaranteed.

Here are some basic steps to get you started in your search engine marketing:

Get Your Site Indexed – This is usually the easiest, as search engines are naturally looking for sites to index. If you have a blog associated with your site, the blog itself will attract search engines through its ability to “ping” or notify the search engines every time you make a post to your blog. Search engines will also find you through other sites that link to yours, or even through a search engine submission form.Here is a tip: Never, submit your site through a website or service that offers to submit your site to hundreds of sites and directories. 99% of the included search engines and directories are junk and can overflow your email with spam, or worse, are often viewed by the major search engines as junk directories which can actually penalize your online store in it’s overall rankings. Concentrate on the Big 3 at first: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Then you can expand out from there after you have had time to review the other sites. You only need to submit your site once. You do not need to keep resubmitting your site. Doing so can get your site banned.

Choose Your Target Keywords: This is a matter of taking a step back from your site, and looking at the words used to describe your website as well as its product pages. Each page should be reviewed to choose the best keywords for that page. Look at your titles as well as the first several words of any paragraph, product description, etc. Remember, focus on meaningful keywords based on the content or purpose of the page, and always target your keywords to your site visitors. You are not marketing to the search engines, you are marketing to people. Your sites usability and relevance to your customers is much more important. If you describe your products or pages accurately through the use of strategically placed keywords, you can impress both the customers as well as the search engines. Some search engine marketers will try and tell you you need a certain keyword density to optimize your page. That is old outdated information. The only thing you need to do is make sure you do not overuse your keywords. Never hide keywords or stuff keywords on a page.

Optimize Your Content: Most online stores have lousy, static content. The very nature of your online store’s product pages make this a negative when it comes to search engine marketing. The first thing to do is to go through your product descriptions and look at the titles and descriptions. Are they the best that they can be? Most supplier-provided titles and descriptions (for those of you that import this data from your supplier) is lousy. Compare the same product descriptions and titles to the higher end web stores and you will see that these bigger stores took the time to optimize their descriptions as well as add details and other useful information to assist the buyer in making a buying decision. Poor product descriptions will cause potential customers to leave your site. Great product descriptions not only entice your customers to buy, but they are also rich in content. If you can, add interactive content such as customer reviews, etc. which will go a long way in making your pages less static and more dynamic. Remember, search engines like dynamic content.

Attract Links to Your Online Store: The best way to do this is to add content-rich information to your online store. Having a store with just basic product pages is not something that is link-worthy to other website owners. Unless, you have something so unique that others feel like they need to link to you, then you need to do something else to attract links. This is usually done by integrating a blog, building a community, or providing information such as how-to’s and buyer guides to your online store that makes it useful for others. Links are very important as they not only bring in additional traffic, but search engines reward sites with a high number of “quality” inbound links. Inbound marketing should be a high priority for your site. Remember quality is based on relevance and the quality of the site linking to you. That is another reason why you shouldn’t just bulk submit your site to 100′s of search engines and directories. A lot of them are considered “link farms” (sites that exist just to create links to websites to try and trick the search engines that the linked sites are popular). These link farms may get you penalized in your rankings.

Optimize Your Paid Search Program: There are two types of search engine results. Natural (sometimes called organic) and Paid Search (sometimes called sponsored or premium listings). Natural results (those that are automatically linked by the search engine for free) can take months or years to develop, whereas paid search is immediate. Both have their advantages and disadvantages when it comes to your online store. Paid search costs money and has to be targeted to get a good return on your investment, but if done right, can bring in a lot of customers in a very short time. Natural search is more effective and most searchers trust natural search results over those who are paying for their placement. The facets of each are beyond the scope of what we can cover here, but spend some time learning about paid versus natural search engine marketing.

Optimization of your paid search program will include things like landing page optimization, keyword choice and relevance to the search terms you are paying for. Its not enough to just pay for certain keywords, your landing pages have to be targeted to those clicking through and designed to convert traffic.

Embed Social Media Into Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy: Search engines have recently recognized that websites that have a great following through social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter probably are link-worthy and relevant sites. For example, if you have a thousand Twitter followers, then something about your website must be important enough that the search engine may want to link to you. Social media is very popular and very effective. Make sure you take advantage of it.

Make Search Engine Marketing An Operational Part Of You Online Store: Search Engine Marketing should be an operational part of your business. It should be a significant part of your overall day to day operations. Just like customer service, and fulfillment of orders, effective search engine marketing will pay off with increased sales and profitability.

Do not use shady techniques or try to trick search engines: This is VERY important. Always concentrate on your customers, and making your site more useful for people. Do not try to get creative and think that you can fool the search engines. Follow the basics, and work on the content on your site. Trying to trick search engines will get your site penalized, and often banned from their listings. Getting banned from a search engine will cripple your business.

I have only briefly touched on Search Engine Marketing, but I hope that it has given you a taste of some of the important aspects that should make up your Search Engine Marketing strategy. This is an area, you should spend some significant time learning and testing in, as it really is key to obtaining customers for your online store.