Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Mon, Apr 12, 2010
How To Get Found Online: Search Engines Presence
As I normally state in these Inbound Marketing blog posts, the information below was created for businesses & professionals looking for inbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing professionals should already be familiar with this information but I do encourage marketing professionals to share this blog post with their readers.
There are generally two forms of search engine results:
1. Sponsored or paid results
2. Organic or natural results.
Sponsored Results: Paid search engine results (sponsored results) are those listings that require a fee for the search engines to list their link for specific, selected keywords or keyphrases. The most widely used form of paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC). This is where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement on the search engine results page (SERP). The price increases with the level of competition of the selected keyword.
Organic Results: Natural or organic search results are gathered by search engines’ web crawlers and ranked according to relevance to search terms. This relevance is calculated by criteria such as:
• Extent of keyword match
• Keyword prominence
• Keyword frequency
• Keyword relevance
• Number of links into that website or web page
Ranking in the organic search results is better because not only is it FREE, but research shows that people click on the organic results 75% to 84% of the time and paid results only garnish 16% to 25% of the attention. Part of the reason for this is that consumers are intelligent enough to understand that money alone can get a web site to the top of a page through these sponsored ad purchases but organic results are dictated by the direct relevance as determined by Google or the other major search engines. This gives organic search results and those web sites that achieve these results much more credibility.
How Do The Major Search Engines Decide Page 1 Rankings?
Google and the other major search engines rank websites in search engine results pages according to relevance to the search terms. This relevance is calculated by looking at both on-page factors such as the content on your site and off-page factors in the form of inbound links to your website. Off-page factors (number of links to a given web page or web site) are the biggest influences in your website’s ranking in search engine results. With these factors as the primary influence, any web site with inbound marketing as a priority, needs to learn how to do some or all of the following:
1: Research & Develop Master Keyword Inventory
• Search Volume – Given two different keyword phrases, optimize for the one with the larger number of searches.
• Relevance – Choose keywords that your target market is using to describe and search for your products and services.
• Difficulty or Competition – Consider your chances for ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase. Look at the sites ranked in those first 10 slots, their authority and relevance to search terms, and gage if you will be able to overtake them to secure a spot on that first page.
2: On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Place keywords in the page title, URL, headings, and page text.
• Optimize your page description for maximum click-through-rate when your site ranks in Google searches.
• Place keywords in other “invisible” places on your web site, including meta-keyword tags and alt-text on images.
3: Off-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Build more inbound links from other sites into yours. Each link serves as a recommendation or a reference.
• Build more links within context, i.e. those with valuable keywords in the link anchor text (the text that is hyperlinked to your site). Link anchor text provides context for the search engines to understand what your site is about.
• Build more links from trusted websites. Just as references from well-respected friends and experts offer more value, so do links from trusted and well- respected websites.
• Link-building tips:
o Submit your website to directories like the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com
o Communicate with others in your industry through blogs and other social media
o Create compelling tools (such as an interesting calculator) and content (via a blog, for example)
4: Measure, Evaluate, Analyze & Modify
• Track number of inbound links, keyword rank over time and compared to competition.
• Measure real business results: number of visitors, leads, and customers from SEO.
Below is an example of search engine ranking results produced for my company. This is some of the data I use to help understand my inbound marketing productivity.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Sat, Feb 27, 2010
The best search marketing must be complete search marketing.
To be clear, as a search marketing professional, my experience tells me that the more complete a search marketing strategy and plan is, the more effective it will be. Maybe that is nothing more than common sense to some but others don't seem to be clear about the various elements that are available when creating a comprehensive search marketing project.
Use the search marketing checklist below as a basic road map for your search marketing project. The more of these components you have included in your plan, the better. Remember though, don't just include them, pay them attention and develop them consistently.
Best Search Marketing Checklist:
- Compelling content: Make sure you offer the visitor what they were searching for in the first place. This helps your efforts from both the visitor and the search engine's perspective.
- Blog: This is critical for developing your timely content, attracting links and increasing the total number of pages on your web site.
- # of Indexed Pages: Pay attention to the number of your web site's pages that are indexed by Google. The more, the better.
- Readability Level: Make sure your writing and the content is developed for your target market and not too difficult to understand or too elementary.
- Meta Tags: Make sure all the HTML tags on each of your web pages have been optimized for the relevant keywords or keyphrases. These include title tags, description tags, header tags, image tags and keyword tags at a minimum.
- Domain name renewal term: Make sure your domain name is renewed for more than 2 years into the future. The search engine see this as a component of stability.
- Domain name redirect: Make sure you have a permanent redirect for the http://domainname.com portion of your sita as search engine may see this and the www.domainname.com as two separate web sites.
- Inbound links: The more links from other web site's that point to your web site the better. One way links are your goal as reciprocal links don't carry weight anymore. You also want links from related web site's with good traffic.
- Directory listings: Secure as many free and certain paid directory listings as you can. Ex. Yahoo Directory
- Linked In account: Especially if your products or services are business to business related, this is a good social media web site to connect and promote.
- Twitter account
- Facebook or Facebook Fan Page
- Utilize del.ico.us bookmarketing
- RSS feed: Make sure you make it easy for others to receive your developing content
- Landing pages: Be sure to have your web site configured to provide targeted information to targeted markets and keywords.
- Conversion forms: Make sure you have conversion forms in place to convert traffic to leads.
- Lead generation software
- Lead tracking software
- Lead nurturing software
- Comprehensive search marketing software: Manage all of these and other elements of your search marketing plan with a complete software application.
These elements have much more detail than what I have listed in this best search marketing checklist. My recommendation is to use the advice of a search marketing professional coupled with search marketing software. There are other components of a comprehensive search marketing strategy but this best search marketing checklist is a great place to start the analysis of your project.
