Search Engine Marketing Outline

Search Engine Marketing Primer Book

Search Engine Marketing The goal behind search engine marketing is to attract new, targeted customers your business Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490

Search Engine Marketing “ Marketing a website in search engines. Typically via SEO , buying Pay-Per-Click ads, and paid inclusion.“ From SEOBook.com’s Search Engine Marketing Glossary Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490

Why Search ? “… Nearly two-thirds (64%) of all respondents went online before making a purchase in the past three months. Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Sterling Commerce Survey Highlights the Importance of Cross-Channel Execution as Consumers “Channel-hop” between Web, Store and Call Center 2/4/08 That percentage was even higher for “high-value” consumers, such as those with household incomes of about $75,000 (81%), college graduates (78%) and consumers age 25 to 34 (77%). “

Search Engine Optimization “ Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries. “ Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 From SEOBook.com’s Search Engine Marketing Glossary

Van Dyke’s Restorers is pretty happy with the results of its site redesign. With a 450% increase in traffic within three months and a 500% leap in revenue, why wouldn’t the Woonsocket, SD-based cataloger be happy? What’s more, the redesign didn’t involve major changes to the Website offering. All that the marketer of woodworking and furniture restoration supplies had to do was optimize the site so that the company could take advantage of one of the most frequently missed emarketing opportunities: search engine marketing. Search engine marketing is the ultimate targeted, low-cost, high-return weapon in the i.merchant’s promotional arsenal. Search engines offer unrivalled exposure to the broader Web audience and allow businesses to reach people who are seeking the products and services they offer. And search engine listings are a more effective space for promoting your business to those people, who are six times more likely to click on a search engine listing than on a banner ad. Yet most marketers know much more about banner advertising than about what’s needed to do to make their Website search-engine-friendly. Key phrases are key The first step in developing a search-engine-friendly site is choosing the right focus for your Web pages. You need to identify the keywords and phrases most relevant to and popular with your target audience, and then incorporate them into your site. Search engines index a staggering number of Web pages. To generate a meaningful amount of traffic you need to be listed on the first or second page of search results. And achieving this for a one-word search will be next to impossible. You will just be one of thousands of sites vying for those top positions. At the same time, Internet users learn over time to refine their searches to get more-relevant results. Someone searching for “digital camera reviews” instead of “cameras” will get a fraction of the search results, and those results will be much more useful to them. For those reasons, you should focus on two or three key phrases rather than individual words. Achieving a top-10 position for a search phrase such as “digital camera reviews” is a more attainable goal than gaining the equivalent position for “cameras” - and it will yield much more qualified traffic. A number of resources can assist you in identifying the most popular of relevant keywords and phrases. For instance, search engine listings provider Overture.com offers a “search term suggestion tool” that will tell you how many times a particular word or phrase was searched for by its users during the past month. A car dealer would discover that the keyword “car” is more than five times as popular as the keyword “auto.” And a clothing retailer would find that “clothing” is 30% more popular than “clothes” and nearly twice as popular as “apparel.” If you have a single keyword in mind, you can use the free Overture tool to suggest good key phrases to target, ranked in order of popularity. For example, enter “clothing” and you’ll be presented with related key phrases such as “baby clothing,” “kids clothing,” and “plus-size clothing.” Be aware that Overture’s suggestion tool has shortcomings. First, because Overture auctions off keywords on its site to marketers, the results are skewed by the number of times keyword buyers check their rankings to adjust their bids. Furthermore, Overture combines singular and plural forms together, along with popular misspellings, then displays the aggregate number alongside only the singular form. Using the Overturn tool in conjunction with others like WordTracker allows you to go even further in your keyword research to uncover relative popularities between singular and plural forms and misspellings. A subscription service that costs about $200 a year, WordTracker bases its results on data collected from the meta-search engines MetaCrawler and Dogpile. Using WordTracker, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast would learn that “accommodation” is more than five times as popular as “accommodations” and that the misspelling “accomodation” is nearly as popular as the correct spelling. But appearances can be deceiving. Often the keyword-rich body copy appears to the user to be at the top of the page, when in actuality Javascripts, tables, and image maps may be pushing the copy quite far down in the HTML source code, which is what the search engines read. A search-engine-savvy HTML programmer can strip out unnecessary code and reorganize the code that remains so that your body copy is more prominent. “ Every page has a song,” says search engine marketing guru Danny Sullivan, meaning that every page has a unique composition that can be fine-tuned. Don’t try to cram every keyword and phrase imaginable onto your home page. Instead, make each page of your site “sing” for its unique topic. An online music store, for instance, would do much better to optimize its “jazz” page, its “Craig David” page, and so on than to try to incorporate all the artists whose music it sells as keywords on its home page. Weave a web of links Key phrases aren’t the sole determinant of search engine prominence. Links matter too. A network of sites that link to your site will not only drive traffic in their own right, but they will also increase your “link popularity.” Search engines use link popularity to indicate the worth of a site’s content. They consider sites with many links from other sites more likely to be relevant to a search and therefore rank those sites higher. Industry heavyweight Google uses its proprietary PageRank system to place the most emphasis on links from sites that it considers “important.” In other words, links from sites possessing better PageRank scores will be given more weight and have a greater positive effect on your position in the search results. You can check your PageRank rating with the Google Toolbar . To boost your link popularity, submit listings for your Website with major directories such as Yahoo!, Open Directory , and LookSmart. Also request that niche sites and vertical portals in your industry link to your site. Sites that link to your competitors are also good targets. You can find many of these sites quickly using MarketLeap’s link popularity checker . Stay away from automated submission bots that promise submissions to thousands of search engines and directories. You will be paying for submissions to totally irrelevant or defunct Websites. And reputable search engines tend to ignore or penalize bulk submissions. Likewise, resist the temptation to boost your link popularity by submitting to “free for all” links pages. These are simply pages that are full of links - you submit your Web address and are automatically added. Search engines discount these pages too. (In fact, some search engines, such as Google, are known to “punish” sites for associating with them.) It is far better to spend time establishing reciprocal links with sites that offer content complementary to yours. Alternatively, developing an affiliate program, in which you reward sites that link to yours, can improve your site’s link popularity. HTML to warm a search engine’s heart Okay, you’ve identified the key phrases you need to focus on and made them prominent in your Website copy. You’ve made your site Miss Popularity in terms of links with other sites. Now what? Time to make sure that the HTML code that makes up your pages includes search-engine-friendly elements: Title tag (H1 and H2). Instead of an H1 headline that reads “Select an item below for further details,” you’d be better off with a headline that says “Men’s apparel and accessories.” But appearances can be deceiving. Often the keyword-rich body copy appears to the user to be at the top of the page, when in actuality Javascripts, tables, and image maps may be pushing the copy quite far down in the HTML source code, which is what the search engines read. A search-engine-savvy HTML programmer can strip out unnecessary code and reorganize the code that remains so that your body copy is more prominent. “ Every page has a song,” says search engine marketing guru Danny Sullivan, meaning that every page has a unique composition that can be fine-tuned. Don’t try to cram every keyword and phrase imaginable onto your home page. Instead, make each page of your site “sing” for its unique topic. An online music store, for instance, would do much better to optimize its “jazz” page, its “Craig David” page, and so on than to try to incorporate all the artists whose music it sells as keywords on its home page. Weave a web of links Key phrases aren’t the sole determinant of search engine prominence. Links matter too. A network of sites that link to your site will not only drive traffic in their own right, but they will also increase your “link popularity.” Search engines use link popularity to indicate the worth of a site’s content. They consider sites with many links from other sites more likely to be relevant to a search and therefore rank those sites higher. Industry heavyweight Google uses its proprietary PageRank system to place the most emphasis on links from sites that it considers “important.” In other words, links from sites possessing better PageRank scores will be given more weight and have a greater positive effect on your position in the search results. You can check your PageRank rating with the Google Toolbar . To boost your link popularity, submit listings for your Website with major directories such as Yahoo!, Open Directory , and LookSmart. Also request that niche sites and vertical portals in your industry link to your site. Sites that link to your competitors are also good targets. You can find many of these sites quickly using MarketLeap’s link popularity checker . Stay away from automated submission bots that promise submissions to thousands of search engines and directories. You will be paying for submissions to totally irrelevant or defunct Websites. And reputable search engines tend to ignore or penalize bulk submissions. Likewise, resist the temptation to boost your link popularity by submitting to “free for all” links pages. These are simply pages that are full of links - you submit your Web address and are automatically added. Search engines discount these pages too. (In fact, some search engines, such as Google, are known to “punish” sites for associating with them.) It is far better to spend time establishing reciprocal links with sites that offer content complementary to yours. Alternatively, developing an affiliate program, in which you reward sites that link to yours, can improve your site’s link popularity. HTML to warm a search engine’s heart Okay, you’ve identified the key phrases you need to focus on and made them prominent in your Website copy. You’ve made your site Miss Popularity in terms of links with other sites. Now what? Time to make sure that the HTML code that makes up your pages includes search-engine-friendly elements: Title tag This is the most critical HTML element on your Web page for search engine rankings. A good page title is 5-13 words long with important keywords placed near or at the But appearances can be deceiving. Often the keyword-rich body copy appears to the user to be at the top of the page, when in actuality Javascripts, tables, and image maps may be pushing the copy quite far down in the HTML source code, which is what the search engines read. A search-engine-savvy HTML programmer can strip out unnecessary code and reorganize the code that remains so that your body copy is more prominent. “ Every page has a song,” says search engine marketing guru Danny Sullivan, meaning that every page has a unique composition that can be fine-tuned. Don’t try to cram every keyword and phrase imaginable onto your home page. Instead, make each page of your site “sing” for its unique topic. An online music store, for instance, would do much better to optimize its “jazz” page, its “Craig David” page, and so on than to try to incorporate all the artists whose music it sells as keywords on its home page. Weave a web of links Key phrases aren’t the sole determinant of search engine prominence. Links matter too. A network of sites that link to your site will not only drive traffic in their own right, but they will also increase your “link popularity.” Search engines use link popularity to indicate the worth of a site’s content. They consider sites with many links from other sites more likely to be relevant to a search and therefore rank those sites higher. Industry heavyweight Google uses its proprietary PageRank system to place the most emphasis on links from sites that it considers “important.” In other words, links from sites possessing better PageRank scores will be given more weight and have a greater positive effect on your position in the search results. You can check your PageRank rating with the Google Toolbar . To boost your link popularity, submit listings for your Website with major directories such as Yahoo!, Open Directory , and LookSmart. Also request that niche sites and vertical portals in your industry link to your site. Sites that link to your competitors are also good targets. You can find many of these sites quickly using MarketLeap’s link popularity checker . Stay away from automated submission bots that promise submissions to thousands of search engines and directories. You will be paying for submissions to totally irrelevant or defunct Websites. And reputable search engines tend to ignore or penalize bulk submissions. Likewise, resist the temptation to boost your link popularity by submitting to “free for all” links pages. These are simply pages that are full of links - you submit your Web address and are automatically added. Search engines discount these pages too. (In fact, some search engines, such as Google, are known to “punish” sites for associating with them.) It is far better to spend time establishing reciprocal links with sites that offer content complementary to yours. Alternatively, developing an affiliate program, in which you reward sites that link to yours, can improve your site’s link popularity. HTML to warm a search engine’s heart Okay, you’ve identified the key phrases you need to focus on and made them prominent in your Website copy. You’ve made your site Miss Popularity in terms of links with other sites. Now what? Time to make sure that the HTML code that makes up your pages includes search-engine-friendly elements: Title tag Alt tags Only Google and AltaVista support them, but alt tags are a key element in creating an accessible site. Search engines can’t “read” images, including navigation elements, and streaming media. Alt tags serve as alternate, readable text for the search engines. Hyperlink text Google considers link text to be highly relevant to the linked page. Changing all your “click here” links within your site to keyword-rich phrases will boost your rankings for those keywords. For instance, instead of “For corporate gift baskets, click here,” with the link embedded in “click here,” consider “Explore our selection of corporate gift baskets” with “corporate gift baskets” as the hyperlink text. Meta-tags Most of the major search engines now ignore them, but Inktomi (which provides secondary results for MSN Search), AltaVista, and SearchNZ will still index meta-descriptions and/or meta-keywords. Make sure they reflect the page content, or you may be accused of “spamming.” Design that works The truly optimized Website does not merely incorporate search-engine friendliness as an add-on; such friendliness is built in from the ground up. Certain design elements make every page of your site accessible to search engine spiders (the software that search engines use to explore and download sites). Your site should offer: access to every important page on your site via simple text links from the spider’s starting point - typically your home page. Search engines have difficulty following links that rely on Flash or Javascript. a site map that uses text links. no “stop characters” (?, &, +, =, %, cgi-bin) in URLs. Stop characters are rampant on “dynamic” sites that are connected to databases. Search engines have difficulty indexing and following links from these pages. flat directory structure. Many spiders seldom go beyond the third or fourth level of your site, or more than three or four subdirectories deep. file names and directory names that include good keywords. Now, about those worst practices Even top catalogers can fall victim to worst practices when it comes to search engine optimization. These practices can be broken down into two categories: technology use and misuse, and sneaky practices or “spam.” We’ll start with poor technology choices: Navigation uses dropdown boxes Search engines cannot fill out forms. So pages available only through a dropdown menu will not be indexed. Frames Also called hijacking, this is simply stealing high-ranking pages from other sites and placing them on your site with few or no changes. Often this tactic is combined with cloaking so as to hide the victimized site’s content from human visitors. Obviously irrelevant keywords in HTML tags Placing popular but totally off-topic search keywords in meta-tags, alt tags, and the like. Resubmitting, automated submitting, and deep submitting That is, simultaneously submitting multiple pages from deep within your site using an automated tool. Submit your site to a search engine only after you ensure it’s not already in the search engine’s index, and then submit your home page only once - manually. Not only should you play by the rules, but you also need to keep your affiliates in check, as they can do your brand damage with their spamming tactics. Keep on keeping on Improving your rankings among search engines is an ongoing process. Just as a Website is never finished, neither is your search engine optimization. But don’t obsess trying to create the elusive “perfect” page. Search engines don’t release “how to rank well” manuals or data on such things as optimal keyword density. All search engine marketing is based on educated guesses. Numbers and tactics can change as quickly as they are ascertained. Instead, concentrate on creating great, keyword-rich content; refining it; establishing more links to your pages from relevant sites; and ethically using the tactics presented above. You can’t go wrong (standard disclaimers apply), and you might just find yourself enjoying a big increase in traffic to your Website. What Exactly Is a Search Engine, Anyway? It’s easy to confuse Internet directories with search engines. Search engines are adding directory features, and directories are adding search engine features. Add pay-per-click options, which allow people to bid for prominence in sponsored listings on engines and directories alike, to the mix, and the issue becomes even cloudier. Search engines periodically explore all the pages of a Website and add the text on those pages into a large database that users can then search. With a search engine, publishing Web pages that incorporate relevant key phrases, prominently positioned in particular ways, is critical. With Internet directories, human editors group Websites into categories and provide descriptions or edit short descriptions of the sites submitted to them. With a directory, picking the right category and composing a description rich in key phrases will ensure maximum visibility. The Importance of Google Google, which supplies secondary results to Yahoo!, is the 800-lb. gorilla of search engines. During the past 12-18 months, the majority of well-known search engines suffered a decline in popularity. Not Google. Its usage has skyrocketed. How did Google do it? Google concentrates on providing users with a simple interface, producing relevant results quickly, and regularly indexing a large proportion of the Internet (currently more than 3 billion documents). The resulting word of mouth has allowed Google to quietly achieve more than 20% market share in the U.S. (Jupiter Media Metrix, October 2001). And that’s not even accounting for “Yahoo! Powered by Google.” Not bad when you consider Google’s success is based on a “build it and they will come” marketing strategy. Search Engine Optimization

Elements of Optimization

“ Localized ” or targeted content

Location

Industry

Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Landing Pages

250 or more words

Don’t forget locations !

Updated content

Avoid duplicate content

Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Text Content

Words and phrases commonly used to describe your product, service, location, etc.

Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 What words and phrases do your customers use to search for you? Keywords In Text

Only occasionally used by some internal site search engines

Avoid “stuffing”

Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Keywords In Meta ( archaic )

Not Visible

Not spidered

Text tagged “ Strong ” or “ Bold ”

Outbound Links

Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Emphasized Text

Page Title

Page Headers

Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Meta Tags

Page Description

Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Meta Tags

Alt Text

Useful for optimizing Images and Video

Used by Accessibility Devices and Software

Elements of Optimization Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490

Industry Leaders Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490

Natural/Organic SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490

Google Universal Search Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Google Base - Product Results

Google Universal Search Google Base - Housing Search Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490

Google Universal Search Google Book Results Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490

Google Universal Search Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Google News Results

Google Universal Search Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Google / YouTube Video Results

Google Universal Search Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Google Map / Local Business Results

Google Universal Search At Top of Results Within Results Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Normal vs. “ Blended ” Results

The Google Network Search partners, including: Google properties, including: * Source: comScore Media Metrix (September, 2004)

The Google Network reaches over 80% of Internet Users worldwide*

Content publishers, including: network Other 20% 80% Search & Content

Paid / Sponsored Results Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising Michelle Darnell ● SEM Specialist ● seononsense.com ● [email_address] ● 608-284-6490 Text ads placed by Google through Google AdWords on Google Properties , Google Search Network results pages, and Google Content Network Pages.