Wed, 02 Sep 2009 |
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SEO
Search engine marketing is becoming one of the most important strategies for businesses these days. With research confirming that up to 80 percents of prospective web consumers use search engines or internet directories to find targeted content, search engine marketing is the most widely used method of attracting targeted visitors to a website.
What is Search Engine Marketing?
Whether or not you are just starting out in online marketing, or you have been in the field of web designing, web content management, etc, I am sure you have heard of the term "search engine marketing". According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, search engine marketing is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engine optimisation is a subset of search engine marketing, which is a set of methods aimed to improve a web site''s rankings in search engine results by rectifying the website structure, and content such that they could communicate better with search engines. It plays an important role in a search engine marketing campaign.
The term SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimizer, whichrefers to people who provide search engine optimisation service to web sites owners. Over the years, all different kinds of search engine optimisation information, including the wrong ones have emerged on the Internet. Many of these are grouped as Black Hat techniques by search engines and these have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive unethical marketing efforts and attempts.
These days, search engines are evolving fastly into a form that no one can play any unethical trick in the attempt of manipulating unfair search engine results or you''d get penalized eventually. There comes to the question of whether search engine optimisation still exists. Of course it does! It is still there, but it is more sort of a hard work, rather than easy tricks now. Search engine optimisation can be extremely effective when it is used as part of a smart niche marketing strategy that is a focused, targeted portion of a market sector.
Proper optimising techniques without any black hat tricks can make a web site ranks high on targeted keywords. This handbook will focus on the key things you would need to know in optimising your web site, based on proper guidelines released by search engines. Please note that there is no free lunch in SEO.
Many people I come across, even those who work with the Internet have had little knowledge of how search engines work. To get success in search engine marketing, it is important to understand the behavior of search engines, how they index web sites and rank web sites in relevancy order.
Comparing Search Engines
The concept of using link popularity and PageRank, plus more than 150 criteria to determine web page relevancy had provided the search engine a high degree of accuracy in search result, thus favored by Internet users. Google not only indexes and caches HTML files but also 13 other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash (SWF), plain text files, among others. According to Nielsen Cabinet, Google is the most popular search engine on the web with a 54% market share, where Yahoo! covers 23% and MSN 13%.
If you have been a long time user of Yahoo!, you might have known that the company acquired Inktomi in 2002 and Overture in 2003. Yahoo! Now also owns AlltheWeb, and AltaVista, a popular search engine in mid 90s. Yahoo! outsourced Google for providing its users search results until 2004, when Yahoo! finally launched its own search engine, which is based on the combined technologies from its acquisitions.
MSN Search is a search engine built by Microsoft that comprised a search engine, index and web crawler. Starting 12th September 2006, MSN Search was renamed as Windows Live Search, which plays as a standard search engine like Google and Yahoo! with different search tabs for searching web pages, news, images, music, desktop, local and Microsoft Encarta. Over 2.5 billion queries are received each month through MSN search.
How do search engines work?
Every search engine works differently and every search engine has its own secret algorithm. While it is not possible to fully understand the actual formulae, we do however know the process of how a standard search engine operates. There are three main orders, which are web crawling, indexing and searching. Putting all in an easier way, you can think of it as there is a big database storing a large number of web pages, which are retrieved from the worldwide web itself. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler, which is a so called "search engine spider" or "search engine robot" an automated web browser that follows every link it sees.
When a user makes a search query with keywords, the search engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria. How web crawlers work remains as an interesting topic. Major search engines keep their algorithms private to prevent imitators but there are four major factors combining the behavior of a web crawler. It is important to understand that it is impossible to have your entire website get crawled! Crawler usually only downloads a fraction of a web page, and this downloaded fraction is viewed in the crawler's eyes as the most relevant and important pages.
What is Keyword Research
A keyword is one or more words used by Internet users to find web pages related through search engines. The result is a list of web pages search engines believe most related to the queried keyword phrases. Keyword research is the process of performing an analysis on the set of words or tags related to a web page content so that further marketing and promotion can be done. Internet marketers believe that keywords drive traffic and traffic drives sales, thus by performing a better keyword research, a more successful conversion rate could result to yield benefits to the online business. Nowadays, not only Internet marketers but also webmasters perform keyword research to make sure they know the set of keywords most matching their web page content, and perform marketing campaigns to promote their web pages.
Finding your niche
Finding your niche is the most important thing to start off in online marketing. If you have been running a local business for sometime and you are thinking of moving or expanding to online form, you will probably be a lot easier as it should be straightforward enough for you to list down your keyword phrases.
Over the years, the Internet has been packed with all kinds of businesses from different industries. It’s almost not much room left these days, if you had actually done a market analysis on most of the major industries. Hundred thousands of these merchants are competing aggressively for the market share. How exactly are you going to join in and make yourself special must be thought thoroughly before you actually start doing anything. If you are starting a new business, it is important to do an online market research to know your competitors. Of course, good niches are those that have not much competitors yet and have the potential of being popular. For example, if you are a local florist merchant in Sydney, then you sure would like to be the number one online florist in Sydney. Start from listing down a list of keyword phrases from the main keyword "Sydney online florist".
Keyword Research
Keyword research is not easy as it sounds. If you have neglected keyword research, you might have hard times getting the targeted traffic; if you have selected irrelevant keywords or keywords that are not popular, you will end up wasting your time and money. Always choose a main keyword phrase, instead of a single keyword. For example, do not choose "hotel" as your main keyword. It is not realistic! Nobody who is looking to book a hotel room will search for "hotel". Most seo resources online or reference books tell people to perform keyword research from scratch. This has always been the traditional method and most common method. Although I normally do not do it this way, I might as well tell you how it works:
If you are running a hotel based in Brisbane, use "Brisbane hotel" as your main keyword. Following from that main keyword phrase, build a series of potential phrases that your users might be looking for. In the above example, potential keyword phrases could be: Cheap Brisbane hotel, Brisbane resort, Brisbane hotel, Brisbane 5 star hotel, Best hotel in Brisbane.
After you have a list of keyword phrases, go to WordTracker and find out the potential search volumes of each. This will eventually filter out unimportant keyword phrases and leave you with some of the high searched, targeted ones. This is the traditional way of keyword research.
Keyword Stuffing
Beware of keyword stuffing, which is considered an unethical seo technique and might get your website penalised or banned by search engines. Keyword stuffing is the process of loading many high traffic keyword phrases in the meta tags of a website or in the web page content, without having the actual real content that are related to those keywords. The intention was to gain the maximal exposure of web pages, hoping that search engines will think that the web pages really have those content. Search engines are wise enough these days to know if a web page is using keyword stuffing or not. Other keyword stuffing include hiding text out of view of the visitor. According to about.com''s definition:
Keyword stuffing is a deceptive technique to try and elevate a Web site''s search engine result ranking by hiding text, so it is unlikely to be seen by a visitor but will be visible to search engines. This is usually done by making the font color of text match the background color or by making the text very small. Keyword stuffing is ineffective and may get offending Web sites removed from Google''s search engine index.
External Resources
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