We Know: All About Search Engine MarketingWhat Is Search Engine Marketing?Anyone trying to sell stuff online eventually will become aware of one critical fact: most of your business is generated from popular search engines. You can post to thousands of forums, buy advertising, and even spam (but don't!), yet the very best way to sell your product or service is to have people come looking for you through search engines. Because of this, your placement on search engine searches is critical. You want your site to come up in the first five pages of any search, preferably on the first page. To do this, you will need to understand how the search engines locate your site.
Search engines are huge databases that work with a variety of different formulas to determine where to rank your page. These formulas take into account:
There are other variables that help determine your ranking, but these are the three most important, and the three you have the most control over. Search Engine Marketing: Step 1--Optimize Your Web PagesPage optimization is your first and most critical step. You must first choose a specific keyword combination that you want your page to show up under -- for instance, if you sell wedding cakes out of your home in Houston, Texas, you might think that "wedding cakes" would be a good choice. It's a start. Because there are hundreds of wedding cake companies online, however, you should get more specific. Most brides seeking a wedding cake that you would sell live in or around Houston, for instance, so you might choose the search term "Houston wedding cakes." If you specialize in chocolate wedding cakes, you can use "chocolate" as a secondary keyword, or you can look at other specific keywords to identify your site. Whatever keywords you choose, make certain you put them in the metatags on your web page. These are invisible areas that the search engine "spiders" (miniprograms that bring information about your site to the search engines) look at. Make certain your keywords are in your metatag title and your keywords section. In a web page, these sections are at the top of a page; if you use a text editor, try right-clicking on your page and selecting Page Properties (or Properties -- it varies from program to program), then filling out your Page Title and Keywords sections. Next, write great content articles about your site, or hire others to write it for you. Your site should have text content of at least a hundred words on each page (300-500 is better, especially after the home page) and it should display your keyword in it to a density of at least 5% -- so if you have a one-word keyword, it should be repeated in 100-word text five times, a three-word one twice. Include your secondary keyword to a density of at least 3%. And try to mention your primary keyword in each heading and in the first and last paragraphs of any article. The last item needing to be noted is search engine spam. These are pages with no useful information on them, but with an overkill of specified keywords. Don't do this! Simply write articles that contain useful content. That way, your customer won't feel used, and the search engines won't ban you when they catch up to the spamming problem. Search Engine Marketing: Step 2--Get Other Sites to Link to YouOnce your site content is optimized, you want people to link to your site. There are a few tricks to this as well.
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