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Understanding the BasicsKEYWORD OPTIMISATIONMake no mistake, identifying and targeting the best keywords is still one of the key basic building blocks of a successful search marketing campaign. Tools like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery provide useful data on search engine query volume and keywords - but when it comes to identifying the best keywords for your site, one of the best sources of data is your own! Your site logs are a great place to start - they can tell you what people were searching for when they saw and decided to click on your listing, and the addition of a simple cookie can also reveal how long they stayed on the site, how many pages they looked at, and what page they decided to leave at (so you can gauge the quality of visitor that a particular keyword or search term generates). If you're a new site, or your search referrals aren't sufficient to provide significant levels of data, you can generate this data by using pay-per-click advertising - a short, low-cost campaign is usually enough to establish the keyphrase set that will be best for your site. You will able to see clearly which keyphrases combine both volume and relevance to produce the Holy Grail of SEM - highly qualified (interested) visitors likely to convert to customers, as well as those that are not worth expending effort on. Data like this can ensure that you don't make expensive mistakes by targeting keywords which don't impact your bottom line - even if they bring extra visitors. Instead, you can squeeze the most from every marketing pound by concentrating on those keyphrases which will really make a difference. TRACKINGPay-per-click campaign data can be linked directly to transaction data, so that the viability of running a longer-term advertising campaign in terms of ROI, cost per conversion, cost per acquisition etc can also be determined. Tracking visitors through your site from initial click to transaction, interaction or exit helps you understand more about your customers and how they interact with your site – you can see which keyphrases send you the most traffic and which the most sales, and which pages work better than others. You can assess the value of your 'organic' traffic against your pay-per-click traffic and adjust your campaign spend accordingly. Most importantly, the data can be used to evaluate and improve your search marketing campaign for maximum impact on the bottom line. Of course, tracking and analysing visitor data at this level requires a sophisticated and expensive software solution like WebTrends, ClickTracks or Urchin - doesn't it? Actually, no - Google's Analytics service is free and can be easily installed on most sites, providing an unparalleled level of analysis and control over search marketing for small businesses. LINKSMost people these days are aware that link popularity plays an important role in determining how well your site performs in the search engines. Links from other sites serve as 'votes' for your site and tell the search engines in objective terms how good your site is. However, search engines are increasing the sophistication of the methods by which they evaluate these votes, so that not all votes are considered equal by any means. For example, a link should first and foremost be relevant - that means it should come from a site that's considered to be within the same 'topic community' as yours. The more important a site is considered to be within that community, the more valuable a link from it is considered to be. Furthermore, a link shouldn't appear to be present purely for the purposes of manipulating link popularity - so although you're unlikely to be penalised for it, reciprocal linking and paid text links will often be discounted by the engines. Finally, it's becoming clear that the search engines (and Google in particular) are looking for ways to evaluate sites that go beyond the linking strategies of other webmasters and take actual user experiences into account, and for this reason an awareness of and participation in the social networking/blogging phenomenon is vital. A good linking campaign will paint a picture to the search engines of a site that is on-topic, focused, useful, relevant and valued within its topic community, and will need to use many tools beyond simple link exchange - such as article syndication, RSS feeds, viral media, ongoing content creation, press releases, horizontal and vertical directory listings, comparison and review participation and many more.
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SEM EXPLAINEDUnderstanding the Basics
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