Search Engine Marketing
There are many ways in which you can advertise your site, and search engine marketing is no more than one of these ways. There appears to be a mysticism about the skill of search engine optimization, but there is really not a great deal to it as long as you understand how search engines work, and how they determine the relevance of your website to the keyword concerned.
In fact, search engines list individual pages of your website, though generally it is the index pages that tend to get listed highest. When your keyword is listed, it is in the search engine index that relates to the search term being used by the search engine user. If that search term is relevant to the content of your web page, then your page could be listed for that term. It is the use of that term on your page that determines your listing position, along with several other aspects of your web page and of your website as a whole.
While it would be wrong to say that your complete website is irrelevant in your page listing, it is the optimization of each page that is most important in the listing for that page. If you are to benefit from search engine marketing than it is important that your page is listed at least in the top 20 results, and preferably in the top 10, or on the first page.
The first thing to do is to make sure that you have a keyword for each page: you could use the same for every page, but are better not to. Your home page keyword should relate directly to the main topic of the website. You should include the keyword in the title of the page and place it in title tags as part of the start html formatting on your page. You should then have a heading for each web page that relates to the specific aspect of the website theme that each page is referring to.
This heading should not be just the keyword, but should include it. For example, if the topic of your website is the development of engines, then your heading could be ‘The Early Development of Engines’. However, would this be enough? Keep in mind that the search engine algorithm contains an element that has to determine the meaning of words on your site, in order that the relevance of the page to the search term used by a search engine user can be established. You must therefore make it very clear what kind of engines you are referring to.
Are they steam engines, locomotive engines or internal combustion engines? You have to make that clear by the proper use of vocabulary on your page. Thus, you should use a title such as ‘The Early Development of Locomotive Engines’. This is a simple example, but describes how you must not allow the search engine to take the wrong meaning of an ambiguous passage.
You should use your keyword sparingly – no more than about 1% of the total text on the page, and make the meaning of the page clear by use of other vocabulary to clear up any ambiguity. Use words like train, locomotive, railroad and so on to make the topic of the page clear to the algorithm that analyzes character strings for their meaning. Do this properly and you have a good chance of a high listing for the keyword concerned.
You are advised to use your keyword in the first and last paragraphs, and once more in the body of the text for every 300 words, but no more. If you keep using the same keyword throughout your text, and are light on contextually related vocabulary, you will be lucky to be listed anywhere, let alone in on the first two pages.
There are many other things you must do in search engine marketing to achieve a high listing for your web pages, the major one being achieving links back to your web pages from other websites. This again is highly misunderstood, because once again it is web pages that are involved, not complete domains.
If your web page has a link from a web page with a Google PR of zero, you get zilch for it. If that page has a PR of 7, and has a thousand other links leaving it, you would be better being the only link back from page with a PR of 2. You don’t lose ranking by providing a link to another site, but try to get a good deal, and don’t give a PR zero site a link from your PR 5 site. It is said you don’t lose through it, but nobody knows for sure. Many people think they are getting a good link to a website with PR 8, say, but the link is actually from a page deep inside the site with a PR of zero (because it is not optimized and has no incoming links, just outgoing ones).
There are many other aspects of search engine optimization needed to get you a good search engine listing, and there are also many other ways of attracting traffic to your website. However, there is nothing to beat a high search engine listing (especially hence to provide you with a good online income.
Search engine marketing beats any other online marketing technique for targeted traffic, and while you should use the other means at your disposal such as PPC advertising and blogs to augment this traffic, the search engines can provide more customers to you, as opposed to visitors, than any other marketing technique.
