Search EnginePromotion
Search Engine Promotion (SEP) is the process
of promoting a website in search engines. It starts with
researching and selecting the right keywords, i.e. the types
of keywords and phrases that your target audience will use
to try and find your site. It then involves selecting the
right techniques to use to help get your site high up in
the search engine listings. The three most common search
engine promotion techniques used are search engine optimisation
or search engine positioning, pay per click advertising
and trusted feeds.
Search engine optimisation involves designing
a layout for your web pages so that they become search engine
friendly and appear in the 'natural or organic listings'
section of search results. A key element of SEO is creating
content that relates to the primary keyword phrase that
each of the web pages are being optimised to rank well for.
It also involves submitting the web pages to search engines
and continuously monitoring their positions. For tips on
effective search engine optimisation click here. SEO is
often regarded as a very cost-effective medium to long-term
search engine promotion strategy.
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is different
to search engine optimisation as it allows you to bid for
positions in the sponsored listings section of search engine
results. Pay per click is an open market and your position
in the sponsored results is determined by how much you are
prepared to pay each time a user clicks on a link to your
site. The more you are prepared to pay for each click, the
higher up the results your site will be positioned. The
three main providers of pay per click search engine promotion
are Overture, E-Spotting and Google.
A trusted feed is a method of supplying
website content from a large dynamically generated web site
(for instance an e-commerce site with a large product catalogue)
to a search engine database. Many crawling engines have
difficulty in indexing content from these types of sites
because of their dynamic URLs and frequent updates, and
hence offer a trusted feed as a way for companies to include
their catalogues into the search database. The site pays
for any subsequent referrals by the click.
One other key area of search engine promotion is
visitor reporting and ROI tracking. As marketers
it is important that we are able to effectively measure
our search engine promotion efforts. Using web analytics
tools and bid tracking / ROI conversion software tools we
can measure the number of visitors we get to our sites,
find out where they are clicking and also calculate how
much it has cost us to attract and convert a customer using
SEP techniques. More
information about search engine promotion measurement tools
can be found in our SEM tools section.
