Search Engine Marketing

By Scott F. Geld
Posted Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Search Engine Marketing is one of the most important ways of marketing your business and getting noticed. Most of the people start with search engines and if you are not listed and ranked higher on the most popular ones, then the chances are you would never be even noticed. It is just like having a great restaurant with great menus, but no readers. Where would it take you? Probably "no where"! Search engine optimization and positioning should always be the first and foremost chief concern of any Internet marketing strategy. You should search extensively for information, guidelines, and tips to help webmaster achieve good rankings on search engines. You can search for the latest online tools on the Internet itself to facilitate the implementation of your search engine strategies and plan.

Do everybody know that a website is all about content and product? Yes, they do. Marketing on the Internet through search engine is done through the content you place on your website. Content is like a fire to those flies (i.e. readers here). So when you create your website and decorate it with content, you should keep the few things in mind. You have all the important meta-tags listed in your HTML document and you should also be using the right keywords, descriptions and title for your pages. Beside these, you should also put cool scripts and graphics to make your website stand out in the ocean of information and make it look attractive. Marketing through search engine can broadly be classified under below mentioned heads.

Submission at Main Search Engine

You must first possess a ready website with all the meta-tags in place and ready to be submitted to key search engines. The major search engines where you can submit your website, are listed hereunder:

AllTheWeb.com (FAST Search)
AltaVista
Google
Ask Jeeves
Lycos
AOL Search
MSN Searchv Direct Hit
Yahoo
HotBot
Netscape Search
iWon
Inktomi
LookSmart
Open Directory

Search Engine Ranking

More than 85% of the people get to know about other sites through the search engines. According to a survey by 'Forrester Research', 57% Internet users considered search engines the best way to get on to a website. Email scored the second place by securing 38% of the users; external links third with 35%, and 28% opted for "word of mouth".

Just don't get relaxed here! A mere submission of your site to the search engines is not enough. Unless your site appears in the top 25 of the major search engines, there is hardly any point in taking pain and submitting your beloved site.

According to the April 2000 issue of 'Target Marketing Magazine', the success rate of different mediums is as follows:

Search Engines 46%
Word-of-mouth 20%
Random Surfing 20%
Magazine ads 4.4%
By accident 2.1%
TV spots 1.4%
Targeted email 1.2%
Banner ads 1%

Ergo, you would be loosing thousands of potential customers and register millions of dollars in lost profits, unless your web site secures the top position in search engines. The search engines are the most important source of traffic for your web site. Ignoring them would be foolish.

Search Engine Optimization

Link popularity is the most important ranking factor to consider for the search engine if you are trying to improve your position. The best way to enhance your link popularity is by exchanging reciprocal links with other webmasters. The topic being very vast needs a separate section in order to get explained appropriately.

So keep all these in mind and put your best foot forward to help your website reach places and get noticed by classes and masses.

About the Author
Scott F. Geld is the Director of Marketing for MarketingBlaster.com, a company providing targeted traffic and leads: (http://www.MarketingBlaster.com)