Search engine marketing tips

Search engine marketing requires persistence, a methodical approach, in-depth and up-to-date knowledge in all the principle areas. It is possible to develop the right skills to help you implement basic search engine marketing techniques. However if your goal is to develop more sophisticated and successful search engine marketing campaigns then you need to set your sights on becoming an expert and to do this you will need to devote 100% of your time to this very specialist area.

On this page we aim to provide you with some tips and advice that will help get your website optimisation initiatives off to a strong start.

The majority of the search engine marketing specialist's time should be spent targeting the search engines that will give you the most traffic. The search engines and directories you should focus on are: AltaVista, AOL, FAST, Google, HotBot, LookSmart, Ask, Lycos, Excite, MSN, Netscape, Open Directory, Yahoo and if you are doing pay per click advertising Overture and Espotting. If you don't have the time to optimise pages for all of the search engines above then we recommend you focus on the big three - Google, MSN and Yahoo.

The best time to develop your search engine marketing strategy is before you design or re-design your website. This enables your website designer to create web page designs that are going to be search engine friendly. For example, a site that has been developed using frames is extremely difficult to get indexed well on search engines, so is considered a big "no, no" in terms of search engine friendliness.

Once you have had a specialist search engine optimiser develop suitable layouts for your site you can then start to work through the following key steps.

Step One - Keyword analysis: This is an all-important step. Choosing the wrong keywords will stop you before you even start. Promoting the right types of keywords that your target audience will use to find you can be a time consuming task. However, you can use a service called 'Word Tracker' to help speed up the process. This is, without a doubt, one of the best keyword analysis services we've come across. With 'Word Tracker', you will be able to research the types of keywords users are typing into a search engine to find the desired product, service or piece of information. Visit our Search Engine Marketing Tools section for more information about 'Word Tracker.'

Step Two - Produce pages for your keyword phrases and build those keywords into the body copy, links and alt tags on your site: On each page make sure you use the primary keyword phrase wherever possible and place it within the alt tags of the images, page links and the page URL i.e. "www.searchvisibility/search_engine_marketing.html". It is also worth including the keyword and description meta-tags within your page code, although these days these meta-tags are of less important than they used to be. In fact Google does not even make use of them in determining the relevance of a page.

Step Three - Writing the Copy: Copy is the major player of the game. For this reason, you should strategically place the key phrase in the title bar of the site, use it in the leading header section (H1 tag) and look to achieve a keyword density ratio of around 3% - 4% within the body copy. A good starting point is to produce between 400-500 words of copy per page with the primary keyword appearing around eight to nine times. The first paragraph should ideally start with the phrase and end with it too. Try to repeat the keyword two or three times in the first 50-100 words. Try not to repeat the keyword no more than five times in the first 300 words. As with any form of copy writing make sure you build in clear calls to action.

Step Four - Create a site map: It will be important for you to create a site map so that the search engine spiders can easily pick up and index the pages that make up your website. It is also important that if you use images as navigation buttons to your pages that you include a set of text links somewhere on your page (at the bottom is usually a neat way of doing this). The reason why you need to do this is because search engine spiders cannot follow links from image maps.

Step 5 - Submit your site manually: Once you are happy with the design, content and layout of your web pages you are now ready to submit them. Visit each of the search engines and submit your home and your site map. There is no need to submit all your pages individually if you have set up your link structure and site map correctly. It is often worth your while paying the search engines an express submission fee so that they can index your site quickly and it is definitely worth paying Yahoo to review your site, although they do not guarantee inclusion. For more information about paid inclusion visit our Search Engine Marketing Tools section.

Step 6 - Build quality links: First of all we have found that link building is all about quality and not quantity. You may have heard of terms such as links farms and FFA (free for all links). Setting up links from these types of websites could actually have a negative impact on your ranking. Google places a high degree of importance on the types of websites that link to yours, i.e. does that page relate to the content that it is linking to on your site, does that page itself have a credible Google page rank? It is worth downloading the Google toolbar into your browser and analysing not only your own page rank but also the page ranks of the sites that you are requesting a link from. Ideally you want to set up links from pages that themselves have a Google page rank of four or above.

Step 7 - Monitor, research and refine: Because of the dynamic nature of the Web search engine optimisation requires an on-going commitment. Once you have achieved a top position you can't just sit back and enjoy that position for the rest of your site's lifespan. If you don't adopt a proactive, full-time approach to SEO you won't succeed. This is because new sites continuously enter into the search engine index, the search engines themselves also modify their algorithms and they also sometimes drop your site from their index. So, to prevent your site from slipping down the rankings and into the 'tumbleweed listings' you need to monitor your positions, do you search engine and competitor research and spend time refining your tactics and re-submitting pages.

SEO - it's not easy, and it's not just about tweaking your meta-tags!

SEO is not a straight forward task, it's challenging, time consuming and if you don't know how to do it well, it can prove costly and be a drain on your resources. Because of these factors most companies prefer to hire the specialist skills and knowledge of a professional SEO company that lives and breathes search engine marketing. But beware, there are even search engine marketing agencies that don't know how to do SEO well and some even use rogue tactics that could you put your site in danger of being banned from the search engines. For advice on choosing a reputable search engine marketing agency click here.