Internet Marketing - SEM

SEM: Search Engine Marketing

After 4 weeks your onyl website enquiry is someone selling you a water cooler. Great.

Okay so you've just spent a few thousand pounds on a website and 2 weeks later......erm.....yup. nothing. 4 weeks later you might get a call from someone asking if you want a chilled water dispenser or to change gas suppliers.

I'm not surprised. You see the web has grown and every tom, dick, harry and Tesco store are at it. Did you know that Tesco's do debt management plans - nor did I until I did the SEM for a client and up popped Tescos in the research. They get everywhere. Yet if I mention Tescos enough times in my web copy I might be picked up eventually in a search result, maybe. All depends if Google & co. find me interesting enough, and relevant enough, to list me under any searches for 'Tesco Web Design'.

What is Search Engine Marketing

Ok, firstly be careful with internet marketing/ SEM. There are loads of companies that will knock on your door and promise to get you to #1 in Google. Total Crap. Sorry, but they are talking out their rear end.

You will not get to #1 in google for a competitive search term (keyphrase) unless you have a team of people spending 24 x 7 doing nothing other than getting your site linked to from good quality other sites. Even then Amazon will still probably be top with "buy a book on green plastic lizards", assuming it's green plastic lizards you are selling.

I have though brushed on what it takes to get high in the rankings and that is something called inbound links. These are links to your website from other websites related to your subject. These other websites are already regarded, or ranked, higher than yours. Your website gets a certain amount of vote points from these websites based on various things:

Is the link relevant? (is their site in the same field as yours)
What is their ranking? (it's called PageRank in Google, other search engines have their own internal algorythm)
How many other people are they linking to (you only get a share of the spoils)

Entice people to your site anyway you can

Links from higher ranking websites are seen as a vote of confidence in your website. The more votes from relevant sites means you get a higher rank.Links from a toy shop to a computer shop aren't really worth much (think about it - why would they be?)

What SEM requires you and me to do is think a little more normally. It's not rocket science, it about doing what good businesses do on the high street and applying it to the web.

If you own a High Street shop, where does your business come from? Local shoppers.
Internet equivalent : Google Local, Touch Local, ITV Local, Yell.com

How do people find out about you ? Advertising, mailshots, posters, radio, word of mouth
Internet equivalent : Google Adwords, email newsletters, banner ads on other sites, internet radio, link baiting, web virals

Stop! : what is Link Baiting ?

This is having something on your site that folks come across and like and then link to on their site. Usually this is an article, something funny or a handy tool.

Stop! : what are Web Virals ?

These are things that people pass from one to another, 99% of the time they are really funny. So kind of link baiting but just that bit more effective. In the real word we'd call it gossip.

Stop! : what Is a Search Engine Spider?

It's a program that goes through your website automatically and checks content, links and stuff. When it's done it includes it's findings, if worthwhile, in the search engine index. Each search engine has its own spider programs. Spiders are sometimes known as bots too. Googles' spider is called googlebot.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is stuff you have done on your website to make it spider friendly. It's stuff you've done to support your SEM strategy but alone it wont win you any prizes. Without it though your SEM efforts are usually worthless.

A good web developer integrates SEO during the website build.

A final word about Internet Marketing

So there you have it, it is not just a case of get a website and some magic stuff happens. It's getting more complicated by the day, and when you think that a lot of business is now done online you can see why everyone is fighting to be #1. You can also see now why you can't realistically get to number one for what you might hope.

However, there are certain things you can do to get to number one but I'll save those tips for my clients - and they are not illegal by any stretch of the imagination and probably more profitable anyway.

More:-

7 tips for search engine success

7 tips to avoid search engine disaster