Cre8tive Flow

Introduction

The biggest factor to consider on the Internet when planning marketing efforts are the search engines and the way they operate.  The major ones here are Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN.  They bring a lot of visitors to any web page and so it is important to know how to maximize that traffic.

For every other article in this series, it is possible to put down a few key principles that will have a major impact on your Internet marketing effectiveness.  This is not the case for Search Engine Marketing.

There are a great number of tasks that must be done well to be highly visible to the search engines. The search engine field is in continual evolution and what may have worked well six months ago may no longer be all that effective.  To be on top of all this requires a great deal of attention to detail and keeping aware of the latest developments by research or by involving a reliable consultant.  This article will provide a big picture, summary view of the Search Engine Marketing field.  It will give you an indication of the things that are important to consider. Even so this article will be somewhat longer than the target 1000 words that was promised.

To define the terms, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting your web site on search engines keyword report pages. These are often known for short as SERPs (Search Engine Report Pages).  It includes:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the free process to gain natural or organic search engine visibility
• Paid advertising on SERPs
• or indeed any other marketing programs offered by search engines.

Search Engine Traffic

To illustrate how important search engine traffic is, here is a pie chart showing how visitors arrived at the SMM website during the past six months.

 

More than three out of four visitors came via a search engine.  Less than one in 10 visitors came direct, that is typed the address into the address field or clicked on a direct link to the site perhaps in an e-mail newsletter.  This website includes a blog and has been optimized to be very visible in the search engines.  However other web sites would show similar results.

This is the way the Internet largely works.  For this reason, marketing through search engines, or SEM, is a major activity for most website owners.  Most websites will also find that Google provides by far the most traffic to them.  For the SMM website, Yahoo and Live/MSN bring only a small fraction of the traffic.  Other websites with different audiences might find slightly higher numbers.  StumbleUpon is an example of one of the social media and this will be discussed in the next article on SMM (Social Media Marketing).

The Way Search Engines Work

The first major activity search engines do is to find as many web pages as they can and summarize the content into a huge database.  To understand how a search engine then produces a relevant answer to a keyword query, here is how Google explains it.

The software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

Submitting Websites To Search Engines

Although it is possible to submit websites to search engines, it is not absolutely necessary.  Search engines have spiders or robots that are continually exploring the Internet to find web pages to add to their search engine databases.  They do this by following links from other web pages that may point towards new web pages. The time to do this is measured in hours for Google and in days for most of the other major search engines.

There are two important exceptions to this.

• One is the pinging process involved with RSS news feeds, as mentioned in the previous article on The Blog.  This is an extremely effective way of signaling to all the search engines that a new post has been added to your blog.  However your blog software should be doing this automatically.
• The second is that it is now possible to submit a site map file to the major search engines.  Google provides information on how to do this.

Submitting Websites To Directories

Google puts great weight on the hyperlinks pointing towards any given webpage.  They are what are called back links by Google.  In the early days, Google seemed to value most back links to some extent.  If the sources were authoritative than the links were worth more.  Everyone was encouraged to submit their website to the Open Directory Project or DMOZ or one could even pay $299 to Yahoo for possible inclusion in their directory.  If accepted then a further $299 must be paid for each subsequent year.  There are also many other directories that accept submissions for free.

Google measures the authority of any web page by a factor it calls PageRank™.  This is determined by the number of links pointing to that page and the authority of each of those links.  The authority of any link from a directory page is related to the authority of the page divided by the number of links on the page.  A link out from a directory page with 300 references on it will therefore be one 300th of the authority of that page.

The bottom line on all this is that effort spent in submitting to directories is of very dubious value.  Getting a single blog post that refers to the web page will be a much better use of effort.

Reciprocal Links

Since links are important in gaining Google visibility, some webmasters offer to set up reciprocal links  with other webmasters, whereby each displays a link to the other.  Since the sole purpose is to influence their ranking with Google, this is clearly against the Google Quality Guidelines.  Normally this is only a complete waste of time and effort, even though there are now companies offering to do this service for you.  In some cases where the other website might be deemed by Google to be a bad website then this could invoke a penalty.

The Search Engine Robots Are Blind

The following mental picture will help you better understand how the search engine robots work.  You might almost think of them as blind tracking dogs.  These computer processors handle only digital information.  They cannot see a picture or image.  They assess only the text content and the code that makes up the webpage.  Jordan Kasteler has put together a video that provides more details on How a Search Engine Reads Websites.

One way of checking what the spider sees is to do a Google search for the website.  Normally you will find a link in the SERP to the cached version of the website.  Clicking on that cache link and then on the link at the top right to the text only version will show you what the Google spider is seeing.

Making The Spiders Welcome

In addition to providing webpage content that spiders can see, it is also important not to put blockages in their way.  A good assessment of this is provided as part of the Google Webmaster Tools website.  A wealth of information is provided about your website, particularly if you go through the verification process to prove that you own the website. 

Search Engine Optimization

Developing web pages that will rank highly with the search engines is a huge topic that cannot be treated in detail here.  The references at the end are valuable but the following provide more manageable summaries of what is involved:

• SEO Checklist 
  One of the many you will find by doing a Google search for this.  They are usually fairly long and sometimes contain some misconceptions.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Key
  A short list prepared by SMM
• Writing Memorable Search Visible Blog Posts 
  An approach to the most important aspects of any blog post in SEO terms.

Creating Click Through Serp Entries

One often neglected topic is the Title and snippet that Google shows in the SERP.  Your web page may appear in a keyword search at the #4 position but if the Google snippet for your entry is much more inviting than the three above it, then the searcher may click on your entry.

The first important element is the Title of the web page.  Then Google has an automatic snippet creation process that determines what it shows below the title in the SERP.  You can influence that if the meta description of your web page is carefully developed.  For a blog post it should have a description of 138 characters and spaces because Google often will insert the date of the web page before this text.  With such a meta description length, Google will often reproduce that description as the snippet.  For a traditional web page the description can go to 155 characters and spaces since that is the maximum that Google will show.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

In some highly competitive markets, it may be almost impossible to get web pages that will appear at an early position in the keyword query reports.  One can then use paid advertising in the search reports such as that provided by Google Adwords.  Again this is a large topic and the following will provide entry points to further reading.

• Google Adwords Learning Center 
• SEO ++ PPC For More Sales

Analytics

It is important to monitor how effective the SEO and PPC campaign is so that improvements can be made.  Even the raw website traffic logs can give useful information.  However an analytics program such as that provided by Google gives more easily digestible explanations of what is happening.  If you have concerns about Google knowing too much, other analytics services are available, either free or for a fee.  Clicky is one analytics service at modest cost that seems to have good reports.  There is also a comparison with other analytics services on the Home page there.

Conclusion

This summary overview has been quite lengthy and yet has just touched on many of the topics involved in Search Engine Marketing.  Why not add a comment if you think some aspect should be treated in more detail.  We will then determine how best to meet the need you are expressing.

References:
Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, etc., etc. - Donna Fontenot
The following provide up-to-the-minute information on SEO developments:

• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Land