Search Engine Marketing

The main search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft account for so much search traffic that it is hardly worth mentioning the others. For simplicity let's refer to the big three as GYM.

There are two ways GYM will work for you:

Natural search results - those pages of results returned when you type in a word or phrase. The scary thing you find is that pretty much any search will return over a million results. We tried artichoke and got 1.76 million hits, at 10 results per page and someone would be on the last page!

Sponsored search - these results appear on the right of the search results and sometimes along the top. With Google you set up an AdWords account and can then create a small advert which will appear if you bid high enough for the keywords you choose. Also if your web page has sufficient relevence to the keywords you have bid against.

In either case the search engines encourage people to use them by providing relevant results. If your web site is good enough then it can make page one of the natural results but it has to compete against so very many others trying for the same placing.

You don't need to be an Internet Marketing Specialist

GYM do not allow the details of how they rank pages to be made public but some of it is common sense.

There are many ways of increasing your page ranking but there are also many ways of generating incremental traffic to your pages whether they make the top few pages of a natural search or not.

Presumably you have a talent for something that has led you to set up in business doing it. Or you are looking for a business idea and want to make it an Internet business, either way you need to have some good knowledge of what you do and you need to share that knowledge as a way of bringing people to your site.

Your keyword selection is one area where you are quite likely to get it wrong; you are too close to your business and are likely to be too technical or specific in your selection of keywords. You have to put yourself in your customers shoes, sit at your favourite search engine and type the things a customer would type when looking for your products. Hint: that probably doesn't include your company name.

Something for free has great appeal in this information age and with so many people doing initial research on the Internet before committing to a purchase, free information is a great draw. hence these pages of free advice you are reading.

The free advice also helps people understand that you know what you are talking about and that starts the process of trust, without that trust there will be no transaction.

We offer a full range of marketing consultancy including traditional marketing, internet marketing and search engine marketing. Use the contact page to find out more. <contact>