Search Engine Marketing in all its elements has become increasingly important for internet marketing success.  This section therefore provides resources and some of my personal tips on the key areas of Search Engine Marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Every day, members of your target audience are using Google, MSN and other search engines to look for what you have to sell.  Search Engine Optimization are those techniques that improve the (organic) ranking of your web pages in the search engine results.  Given that most users rarely look beyond the second page of search results, it becomes critical to achieve a high ranking for your key terms. 
  
  Elements of search engine optimization can be grouped as follows:
  


• On-page Elements: The content of your page, the underlying HTML makeup, the prominence of your keywords.  Other considerations: how easy is it for the search engine to crawl your site.
• Off-page Elements: The online visibility of your site is also determined by the number, quality and content of incoming links that point to your web site. 
  


• Pay-per-Click Marketing: PPC or search engine advertising is another very successful way to drive targeted traffic to your web site. With Pay-per-Click (as opposed to CPM), you only pay for traffic that ends up on your web site.  Properly set up, Pay-per-Click can deliver stunning ROI (how does 250,000% sound?). 
  
  PPC, however, has some other uses as well. It gives you a near real-time view of the search behaviour of your target audience. This insight can be used to further improve your search engine optimization work.

You may have noticed that I say Pay-per-Click Marketing, not Pay-per-Click Advertising.  The reason: PPC also has a ridiculously inexpensive branding aspect.  Remember that your ads show every time your target audience searches for your offers, but you're only charged once they click on it.  Impressions are free...  

• Paid inclusion & trusted feeds: I only mention them for completeness sake... Paid inclusion involves paying a listing fee to ensure that a particular search engine crawls your site.  For most of the High-Tech Zone5ive members, this is not a requirement.  However, if you do have frequently changing content, this may be an option.  Trusted feeds are similar, but they typically charge you a fee every time a user clicks through to your site.   
  


• Search Engine Aware Marketing is more than SEO & PPC: Search engine insights can help you in your messaging efforts (use the language that you know your audience uses), and search engines have a dramatic impact on public relations effort as well. 

Is your head spinning yet? 

There's a lot to learn, and I have attempted to compile a number of worthwhile resources to help you explore this increasingly critical area of online marketing.  Feel free to contact me with any questions or suggestions that you may have.

Your Guide 

Chris Biber
President & CEO
SearchingWorks Inc, Ottawa.
chris@searchingworks.com

There's a large number of web sites on the topic of Search Engine Marketing.  Here's just a small sampling.

HighRankings SEO Forum run by Jill Whalen and some of her compatriots, this forum provides answers to many of the search engine optimization questions that you may encounter. An excellent resource if you can spend the time to follow it and dive into the various threads.

Along the same lines, the SearchEngineWatch forum is a very good resource, run by Danny Sullivan (another well-known expert in the field of Search Engine Marketing. 

One of the best known events for the entire search engine optimization and search engine marketing industry is undoubtedly the SearchEngineStrategies series of conferences.  They are hosted by the same folks that run SearchEngineWatch and have been raved about by others.  I haven't gone, but they cover a very broad range of topics for both beginners and experts.

In the recent past, a number of books have been published on all aspects of Search Engine Marketing.  I'm just highlighting a few here, with links to the Chapters site for more info...

Winning Results with Google AdWords by Andrew Goodman, a well known author and speaker on the topic of Search Engine Marketing.  He explains the ins and outs of using Google AdWords to growing your business.  Rather than just covering the basics, he also delves into things such as keyword selection, A/B testing to reveal optimal ad copy and maximize clickthrough and conversion rates, and much more.

And of course, there's also a whole 'For Dummies...' series that covers both search engine optimization and search engine advertising.  The two books in question are Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, by Peter Kent, and Building Your Business with Google for Dummies by industry insider Brad Hill. 

And the number of books, e-books etc. continues to grow at a fairly rapid clip.  For more books on particular aspects of SEM, keep visiting this section or contact me...

Search Engine Marketing can be broken down into a number of distinct phases.  These phases are typically:

• Keyword Analysis identifies the phrases that your target audience is currently using to find your products & services, the frequency with which they use these and the level of competition that exists for these phrases (i.e. how many other sites are trying to rank well for a particular phrase). 
• Site Structure Analysis identifies current strengths, weaknesses, search engine visibility, site crawlability etc. Using this insight, you can then focus on specific areas in need of improvement. 
• Web Page Optimization uses the insights generated in the earlier analyses to improve the on-page factors that are important to organic ranking.  When copywriting for search engine optimization, it is vitally important to keep your readers in mind.  Properly optimized text should read well, not just rank well.  Otherwise, you may draw traffic to your site, but not convert any of it to the next stage in your lead funnel.
• Link Building efforts are also vitally important.  The more relevant, well-written links point to your individual web pages, the better. 
• Monitoring your results.  It can take 3-6 months for your search engine optimization to produce any visible improvements in search engine rankings.  Having said that, the effort is certainly worthwhile: once you achieve high rankings, the resulting organic traffic doesn't cost you a dime.  And contrary to some claims, you don't have to tweak your content incessantly.  Well-written, keyword-rich pages that are linked to from reputable sites have a good chance of ranking well. 
  Stay away from trying to trick search engines in any way, shape, or form.  (such as invisible keywords on your page, showing different content to search engines than to actual visitor (aka cloaking), link farm schemes (sites that have no other purpose than to link to your site) and so.  It's just bad for your business. If Google, Yahoo or MSN drop you from the index for these types of activities, it's a really hard path to get back into their good books ;->

Over the next several months, I will cover the individual phases of search engine marketing, and provide resource tips for each of them.  In the meantime, feel free to drop me a line with any question. 

Happy Search Engine Marketing...