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E-Marketing Part II: Search Engine Optimization

Posted March 13, 2008 By Jean Conover

A few months ago I wrote about several different forms of e-marketing including email campaigns, affiliate marketing and blog marketing. Now I’d like to discuss the type of e-marketing we at TradeMark Media get asked about the most from our clients: search engine optimization (SEO).

Since we also get a lot of questions about just exactly what “SEO” really means, I thought this would be a great opportunity to explain what it is and how it can help your online initiatives.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization can mean many things. According to Wikipedia, it’s “a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote Web sites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages.”
 
In the 1990s, as the number of Web sites began to increase, search engines (such as Yahoo and Google) started to emerge on the Internet to help people find the information they needed quickly. In 2000, Google began to offer advertisements on their search result pages through a program called Google AdWords.

Today, most businesses realize that the closer their sites are to the top of the search engine results list, the more leads they will get. Many of our clients want to know how their site can appear at the top of the search engine results page, and many are willing to pay to be placed as high on the list as possible.

Pay Per Clicks

A popular form of SEO is called pay per click (PPC).

PPC is an advertising model used on search engines where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s Web site. Advertisers bid on the keywords they think their target market will use to search terms when they are looking for a product or service.

When a user searches for one of the keywords the advertiser has paid for, or views a page with relevant content, the advertiser’s ad may be shown above or next to the organic search results.

The price varies depending on the search engine for these pay per click, and some are as low as $0.01. Even though PPC can be relatively inexpensive, some companies prefer to try to enhance their results organically by working on the content of their site.

Organic SEO

On a Google search result page, organic search results are the “normal” (i.e. unpaid) listings. They usually appear below the paid advertising (which is in grey boxes at the top and on the right side of the page).

Organic SEO is focused on maximizing the visibility of a Web site by making its listings appear more frequently and more prominently in the organic search results. This is done in different ways, but the most effective way is to make sure that all content (especially the headers and page titles) is relevant so the search engine can find the most accurate information.

Organic searches are free, but there is an art to making sure your content stays at the top of the organic search results. It might be prudent to hire someone outside of your company who specializes in SEO to optimize your organic search engine results.

If your company hasn’t looked into optimizing your search engine results either organically or through advertising, maybe it’s time to see what the best option is for your business!

 

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