Search engine marketing is a strategic form of Internet marketing that promotes a website’s visibility in search engines. This can be done using a variety of methods and tools, but the overall idea is to help a website get in front of customers searching for it.
There are different ways to market your website and a campaign that works well for one client may not work well for yours.
At YourAdTeam, your website is developed using a multi-dimensional strategy uniquely tailored to your needs and specifically crafted to speak to your target market.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be defined as a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, index, categorize and rank web content.
According to a recent ad effectiveness survey, SEO is the most effective online marketing tactic for generating conversions.
Here’s a basic SEO checklist to help ensure that your website is search engine optimized:
As you cook Christmas dinner today, watch how your hungry guests keep returning to the kitchen– drawn in by attractive, delicious-smelling food. Today, these hungry people are your family, but on your website they represent your visitors.
You want to attract visitors to your website with compelling content. Notice that as your family comes into your kitchen, they sniff it out, maybe even steal a bite. If this was your website, you’d offer the bite in exchange for a bit of information about the visitor and transform them into a lead.
How to Bake a Delicious, Content-Filled Blog
INGREDIENTS
1 blogger (preferably someone passionate about content production)
1 RSS reader (set up and containing blogs related to your industry)
1 URLÂ (with Typepad or Blogspot accounts removed and discarded)
Blog Analytics, installed
2 cups Social Media
1 cup SEO
1 Image, iconic and captivating
Blog Post Titles, Engaging
3-10 Meta Keywords, Researched
1 Meta Description containing 1 Keyword Phrase
Call-To-Action, Attractive and Mixed with a Compelling Offer
A whole lot of patience (don’t worry…if you bake it, they will come)
(Optional) Team of passionate employees who foster a sense of content creation in your company
“Outbound marketing” is where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack. Some examples include trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising.
Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites.
I believe most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing and I advocate that those ratios flip.
Would you go to a hair salon to get your oil changed in your car? Would you hire an attorney to power wash your deck?
Got the point?
Make sure the company you hire to develop your online presence is qualified to lead you through the social media integration process and nurture your online presence for the long haul.
At YourAdTeam, we’re not JUST a web development agency… we’re not JUST a logo design agency… we’re not JUST a brochure development agency… we’re not JUST a direct mail agency. Your overall business success is important to us. We help develop plans to help your company succeed for the long haul.
If you’re an electrician, you should be out wiring.
If you’re a real estate agent, you should be showing houses.
If you’re a fitness instructor, you should be training your clients.
If you’re a store owner, you should be selling.
As a business owner, you certainly shouldn’t be up at 2am trying to figure out what mySQL is.
Full service advertising including the integration of social media on the internet is what we do. What’s your skill set?
More internet marketing techniques to get you going….
Text links almost always outperform banner ads as advertising techniques because they look more like content and people are used to clicking on content (text links) far more than ads.
Internet display ads perform best with Flash animation, motion, or video.
The eye reads top left to bottom right and that impacts your click-through rate depending on where your text links or display ads are on the page.
The page upon which the consumer clicks is just as important as the ad or link that got them there.
Improving or optimizing your own pages and your own site has more impact than optimizing your advertising techniques in text links or display ads.
Don’t assume that just because you built a website people will visit it.
Thinking about advertising on the internet? Check out these simple techniques to get started:
The most powerful advertising technique on the Internet is showing up in organic search results (ideally first page, in the first three results).
Using sites such as Wordtracker.com is currently your best tool, along with Pay Per Click suggestion tools (from Google, etc), to discover which search terms get the most search volume.
Implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table.
Useful content that cannot be found through search engines is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.
A basic blog optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments can improve search traffic substantially – without any compromise in content quality or user experience.
On the other hand, implementing SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social web participation makes link building for SEO an uphill battle.
The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting & linking. Popular social content gets exposure and traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.
Social interactions and media sharing among social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts, or other media.
