Search Engine Marketing - Natural SEO

Search Engine Marketing:

Search engine marketing is a great place to start. Unlike mass broadcasts, where you send your message to millions of people and hope someone out there is interested, the people that see your site on a search engine are looking for what you are offering.

There are 5 components to search engine marketing:

• Natural search engine optimization (SEO): The pages that are displayed in a normal search.


• Contextual advertising: Pay Per Click advertising that ensures your page appears in the sponsored links section.


• Paid inclusion: Ensures the search engines index your page your site often


• Conversion enhancement strategies: Ensures that the visitors you do get on your site take the desired actions.


• Web analytics: Allows you to measure the effectiveness of your search engine marketing campaigns.

Natural SEO
There is more information online then anyone could go through in a life time. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! And MSN, help you sift through the clutter and find what you are looking for. About two thirds of your websites traffic will come from a search engine. It is therefor vital that you use them to your best advantage.

When you register your site with a search engine they send software bots called spiders that collect all the relevant data and key words from your site. The search engine then indexes every site using over 100 different characteristics and ranks the page according to how good the content is relative to the query. Most people never look past the first 5 results so it is important that your site is up there. To be in the top 5 results out of thousands of sites related to any key word means you have to be one of the best in your field. A key word is a word or phrase used to describe the content of a page. It is used buy searchers to find pages that can solve their problems and by you to help them find your site. A search engine will derive keywords from a number of places including:

The content of the page
The description and meta tags assigned in the code of the page
The anchor text of inbound links to the page
The description of the page in web-directories

Step 1 - Identify keywords
Stars by identifying words that searchers would use if they were looking for your products/services. If you had a South African based company that offered an E-business solution your keywords may be something like: E-business software, E-business software solution, E-business management system, E-Commerce solution, E-Commerce SA, E-Commerce South Africa etc.

Step 2 - Apply keywords
Once you have a good list of key words ensure your site is filled with them. Keep in mind that spiders can only read text. They cant read PDFs, videos, pictures etc. Here are some places you can put keywords .

• Your sites text. Use them as much as you can (without sounding ridiculous).


• Your links. Make sure that the spiders know exactly what the link is all about. e.g. Instead of saying For more information on our stock control system click here say - Click here for more information on our stock control system.


• Your sites title, description tags and URLs


• Put keyword rich alt tags on all images, videos etc

Make sure that when a search engine visits your site it knows exactly what each page is about. When you are confident that your site is ready for the spiders you can move to the next step.

Step 3 - Register
You need to register your site with an online web directory. dmoz.org/ is the only one you need to wory about.

Step 4 - Introduce yourself
Next you register your site with the search engines. They cant find you if they dont know you exist. For google, go to www.google.com/addurl/. For Yahoo! Go to submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. For any others just find their “submit site” page.

Step 5 - Generate links
Next you need to generate inbound links from quality pages. You have to have a good link strategy that identifies websites you would like to get inbound links from and a plan to get them.

• Approach sites that you would like links from and ask them to review your site. Your site may be useful to their own sites viewers.


• Advertise on high traffic sites. Make sure the click able part of the advert is a key word and create a description of the destination page.


• Place comments on forums or blogs that deal with issues related to your site. Put your URL in ether the comment or in your signature.


• Create your own blog that links to your site. Make sure you use all these techniques on the blog too.