SEM DataBase

Back in the late 1990s, many internet marketing companies focussed only on the search engines. There is no denying that the search engines do bring results and hence traffic to a website, but there is life beyond the search engines too!

The exceptional, and hence very busy, companies realised that there was far more to marketing than the search engines, and delivered broad and effective campaigns to their clients, using a variety of different strategies and plenty of metrics to assess results. It has taken almost a decade for the industry to catch up that search engines are not the be all and end all of internet marketing, and that the terms “SEO” and “SEM” are just part of the mix.

However, most website owners are still stuck in the ‘old school’ way of thinking, believing that, having built a website, all that is required is to be number one on the search engines and that is the end of the game plan. This level of thinking has far too frequently been backed up by SEO companies who could see a fast buck in optimising a website and ranking it, often for completely obscure terms, to satisfy the customer without educating either the customer or themselves in the finer points of internet marketing.

Invariably, once ranked on the search engines, the customer discovers that little has changed in the way of traffic, enquiries, sales, brand recognition, and so on, and seeks further assistance to increase the results from all aspects of the website marketing, and generate a return on investment. This can become something of a bottomless pit into which to thrown money, particularly if the company being employed to achieve the aims required is only really expert in SEO.

SEO and SEM are just one strategy to deploy in a marketing campaign, and many of the great IM companies take a holistic view to promoting a website, company or product set. Not only do they seek to generate valuable and unique content for the client (or advise on how to do this), but they employ a range of strategies and processes in order to deliver consistent, high quality traffic to a website, and increase the number of conversions from each action to maximise the potential results.

When seeking out a website promotion company, you should look for companies which offer that breadth of thinking. The services they will offer should include:
Email Marketing Forum and blog marketing Pay Per Click campaigns Landing Pages Conversion tracking and metrics Ebooks and article marketing services Press release distribution Optimised content creation Social networking and bookmarking Video and audio content and promotion As well as the good old on and offpage optimisation required to get the search engine rankings.

For every company looking to promote online, there will be a different mix of strategies which will yield the best results, depending on product, brand, target audience and more. It is only by understanding your company and the needs of your potential customers that a suitable internet marketing campaign can be designed, tested and deployed.

Just optimising a few pages for some keywords and phrases has never been sufficient to bring appropriate results, but many in the search engine industry have managed to get away with doing just that, and little more, for over a decade. Now, with the rise of social networks, and the move away from static to dynamic content, virals, and the rise in popularity of video and audio have meant that any company with too narrow a focus when considering marketing tactics can only achieve so much.

Whether you employ an internet marketing company, or train in-house staff to deliver your website promotion, be wary of any specific focus on the terms SEO and SEM. The implication that these are the only methods which will yield results, or the fact that whoever is using them may be unaware of all that is required to deliver an effective online promotion campaign should be fair warning that the person or company using them is still adopting an outmoded way of thinking.

Search engine marketing also known as SEM is one of the components of internet marketing. The process surrounds the building and marketing of a web site with an aim to improve its position in search engine results. Search engine marketing is vital for the internet marketing and for any form of information that is to be spread through the means of internet or in other words, high visibility and top placement of a website is the key for any online organization and business regardless of its size and the market.

There are number of methods for doing search engine marketing that increase the visibility of a website in result pages of search engines. The three main methods are as follows:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): One of the methods of Search engine marketing is SEO. Eighty five percent of the web traffic generates through searches through keywords where sixty two percent of the searchers just click on the results shown by the first page and rest generally do not go beyond the fifth page of the results. So, it is vital for online business to look as soon as possible for SEM and be visible in all major keyword search results and rank high. Each search engine has its distinctive way of ranking and caching web pages. When the website’s content and overall structure is easily understood by the various search engines’ programs, it is said to be effectively optimized site. The true SEO work entails hundred of diverse variables that are examined and applied in the tactical process. By optimizing the website, it is possible to maximize the site’s ranking for relevant key phases in organic and natural search results.

• PPC: PPC is an acronym for “Pay Per Click” and is very effective method for search engine marketing that takes services and products to target audience. In this technique, when the search is made with a phrase or words that match or are close to the website’s key words, an advertisement is displayed by the site along with the search result. These ads are exhibited either adjacent to or above the organic search results or anywhere a web developer chooses on the content site. These are known as the sponsored ads or sponsored links. The popularity of the keyword influences the cost of ad and advertisers pay their host only when someone clicks on their ad. There are mainly the two models that determine the cost per click: one is flat rate PPC and another is bid based PPC.

• Contextual advertising: It is a method where marketers place ads on other sites that contain information relevant to the product. These ads are in form of text ads or banner ads that generally appears as the pop-up ads. SEM through contextual marketing was first started by Google and now numbers of other search engines have joined the battle.

There are many other methods too for the Search engine marketing that are offered by various search engines such as pay for inclusion (PFI), lead generation, etc.

After conducting extensive research I have come to the conclusion that there is a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding the subject of Search Engine Marketing. The greatest misunderstanding is in confusing the terms Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

One would think that those individuals claiming to be SEO experts should be knowledgeable about the subject and recognize the clear distinction. Apparently this is not the case; the internet is full of misguided information, from so called experts. Proving, I suppose that the industry is liberally spattered with cowboys.

To start, let us first define the term “Search Engine Optimisation” (henceforth referred to as SEO).

SEO

SEO is the process of manipulating the structure and content of a website in such a way that it will perform better in the search engine’s organic listings. The techniques involved can be sub-structured into several areas of activity, as detailed below.

1) Page readiness – Search engines expect to crawl clean HTML code. Every page of a website should be validated to eliminate errors and sloppy coding.

2) Site readiness – Search engine web bots follow the links on your web pages and thereby find new pages to index. If a web bot meets a broken link it cannot continue spidering your site. Make sure you have no broken links. Also, provide a site map. A tool for creating site maps is available at my website, www.pro-seo.co.uk/ror-sitemap-generator.shtml.

3) Keyword selection – It is vitally important to select the right keywords for which a particular page is to be optimized. The most obvious keywords are not always the best choice, and are often mega-competitive. Choose wisely.

4) Site structure – Your website should be structured in such a way that each page can be optimized for a maximum of two keywords. Do not try to optimize for a lot of keywords on one page. Remember, you have to write for your users. Writing copy is a balancing act that keeps both users and search engines happy, and is better achieved on a well structured site.

5) Copy writing – the visible text on your web pages should be structured to include the two most important keywords for that page’s content. Get the keywords into headers. Work the keywords into paragraph text, having your keywords appear near the beginning, near the middle, and near the end. Make some keywords bold, some italic and some underlined.

6) HTML tags – The most important of these is the Title tag. Get both keywords for that page into the Title tag, without repetition. For example, if your main key phrase is “diet plans”, and your second phrase is “diet supplements”, the Title tag should read “diet plans and supplements”. Do not repeat the word diet, to search engines it may look like spamming. If your main concern is to improve your Google ranking, you may have overlooked the Meta keywords and Meta description tags, don’t, there are more search engines than Google and they can all bring traffic. Also, get the keywords into H1 tags, H2 tags, alt attributes, and very important, your link text.

And after doing all that for every page in your website you may be asking: so where does SEM come in?

SEM

SEM includes SEO plus all the other things you can do to boost your visibility in the search engines and increase targeted visitors to your website. A condensed list may be as follows:

1) SEO (see above).

2) A link building strategy.

3) Pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

4) Banner exchanges.

5) Press releases.

6) And any other activity that will get your website noticed.

SEM then, is the full package. Whereas SEO techniques are a vital, but not the only, component of that package.

Wikipedia defines Search Engine Marketing as a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

I could go into the technicalities of SEM, algorithms, robots, etc. However, if you’re reading this article, you probably aren’t interested in me stuffing a bunch of technical terms down your throat. You would rather learn about search engine marketing and how it can bring you more business.

I chose this topic today based on a couple of conversations I recently had with new clients.

One of our clients had embarked on a small ad campaign with Yahoo before coming to us. He mentioned that when he was spending the money on Yahoo, the traffic to his site was much higher. When I asked how many sales he garnered from the advertising, he replied that he didn’t know. Website traffic and conversions to sales are two completely different things, with the latter obviously being more important. It’s crucial to keep track of your ROI (Return on Investment), if you are going to invest in online advertising. Make sure that you have the tools within your company-whether it’s your own database for tracking sales, or another form of tracking system-before you spend your first marketing dollar.

Another conversation I had with a client involved a Google Adwords campaign. He was bidding using every keyword under the sun. He had a huge CTR (Click Through Rate), but again, nobody was buying. At the end of the day, his budget was gone and he didn’t have anything to show for it besides lots of traffic and an empty bank account. Until I explained to him that he was paying for people to come to his site and quickly leave, he didn’t “get it”. Having the right keywords in your campaign and your ad copy, that are relevant to your product or service, will get you qualified click through to your site. You don’t want people to click on your ad, only to find that your site doesn’t offer the information they were looking for, and leave immediately. That will cost you wasted dollars each and every time they do that.

My advice to our clients is to, first and foremost, invest time on SEO. As long as you are engaging in honest practices, and not trying to fool the “Big 3″, the benefits will far outweigh the time you spend. If you can afford to hire a reputable firm, all the better! Please be aware that there are self-professed “SEO Experts”, who claim they can get you to the top of the SERPs, guaranteed. Any company representative who spews this line at you is most likely just out to take your money. Check them out thoroughly. Conduct an online search on their company, and don’t just stop at the first few pages of the results-dig deep to discover if they are reputable or not. Check with the Better Business Bureau or other consumer watchdog organization. Reputable firms won’t guarantee top placement, but they will give you realistic projections of how they can help you improve your placement results.

Until you really have all the pieces in place, it’s best not to engage in a pay per click campaign. Remember that it takes testing, monitoring and tweaking, as well as a significant amount of your time, before you will see any benefits.

I’ll start with my own experience:

A few years ago, the company I worked for ventured into a rather large PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign. We hired an expert, had all the tracking tools in place and launched a campaign to knock out our competition and drive traffic to our site; paying close attention to our sales funnel and expecting to convert our “browsers” into “buyers”. In addition to our PPC campaigns, we also hired a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm to help us with the natural results. Natural results are the result of traffic coming to your site outside of paid links directing it in. It should be noted that we had all the puzzle pieces in place and spent time on the following:

1. Analyzing the results from the analytics

2. A/B testing of different landing pages

3. Closely monitoring the PPC campaigns

4. Adjusting our ad copy and landing pages based on our conversion rate

We hired top firms for both the “paid” and “natural” campaigns, as well as an expert to oversee both of the campaigns. Without getting into the numbers here, (and believe me they were big), the end result was as follows:

1. We spent a large amount of money getting traffic to our website via the pay campaigns. The increased traffic did result in increased sales, however – the results made each sale a VERY expensive one, and not really worth the money that was spent on the marketing campaign. In short, our ROI (Return On Investment) was in bad shape.

2. We spent 80% less on the SEO campaign, which took longer, but garnered results that are still driving traffic to the website to this day.

In the end, we spent a ton of money getting traffic to our website which did not result in sales, and we learned several valuable lessons. In addition, we did suspect throughout our campaigns several instances of fraudulent PPC activity. Unethical companies will engage in this practice by hiring offshore companies at ridiculously low rates to click on their competitors’ ads. These companies use various IP addresses to avoid detection. The idea is to exhaust a competitor’s budget before legitimate click through and potential sales can occur. When we reported suspected PPC fraud, some clicks were refunded via ad credits (Yahoo!) and some could not be proven and were not refunded (Google). The best advice I have for companies on a small budget is to work on your natural search results via search engine optimization, and use various other forms of advertising, such as placing a print ad, and perhaps a nice banner ad (where you pay per month, not per click) on a relevant site. Later, when your marketing budget has grown, you can branch out into other forms of media, such as local radio or television.

With the number of web pages online exceeding the human population you can be sure that the fight for online visibility is going to get fierce. Search engine marketing (SEM) is probably one of the best alternatives for businesses looking to beat the competition.

You might see that a lot of people opt for link building or SEO separately, but one thing that can benefit you more than anything else is a SEM campaign. In a SEM campaign the online marketer not only looks at the rise in the rankings on the search engine, but also at creating the right kind of impression on the visitors to the site. This means that the conversion rates become better which ultimately helps your business with a better cost per acquisition.

A professional company will not only take care of the kind of content you present but also the way your site looks. The campaign is more like branding your site, a strategy that comes in handy during the current scenario of increasing competition.

A close examination of the costs involved would help you understand that most professional companies charge a very limited amount for SEM (may be $25-50 more than what they charge for SEO). This is not a bad deal as it is proven that with professional SEM your site will be able to get nearly 30% more conversions, which means that if you are getting 100 clients per month from your SEO campaign where you might be paying $500-600/month, for an extra few bucks you get 33 or more customers, that’s amazing.

It is the right time you switched over to a profession SEM company so that you can move ahead of the competition and remain there for the betterment of your business.