Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘key word phrases’

SEM Strategy: T is for Title—The First Impression

Friday, January 28th, 2011

On a website, just like a news article or any written document, the title describes what is in the document. One of the easiest things you can do with search engine optimizing your online business is to have unique titles for each of your pages. If necessary, you should also create keyword optimized titles throughout the website content, to help break up the ideas.

Ideal titles are 8-10 words at most, descriptive of the content on the website without being too long. Generally speaking, if you want the titles to help improve website performance, they should be unique, describe the important things on the website and in the best situation, be something used as the link anchor text. Descriptive anchor text increases the chance your link will be clicked on.

In order to write SEO friendly titles, either choose from your bank of researched keywords strongly associated with your Internet marketing business, or select the key phrases, issues and familiar buzzwords surrounding your niche website business that your target audience can strongly associate with. The bonus of using popular buzzwords is you will engage your target audience and compel them to select your link, but your web content should relate to your title, or it will affect your bounce rates negatively.

Like any first impression, a title tag gives strangers an impression of what your online business looks like; be sure to put your best foot forward.

SEM Strategy: Q is for Query Refinement—What Are They Looking For?

Monday, January 24th, 2011

There’s Google Instant and Yahoo Rich Search Assist (you think they would have found a better name for it, being a search refinement and all) as of the end of 2010, but what is query refinement, and how does it help the search engine marketer?

The second part is a maybe. As for the first, have you noticed recently as you’re typing a question in either Google or Yahoo’s search engine boxes, a half page of suggestions crop up? Or, if you misspell a keyword in your search term, many search engines show a message like “do you mean ___” underneath the search bar.
As a search engine optimization or search engine marketing person, query refinement can help your website if you’ve got your SEO analytics up to date. It also helps your online business by guessing what your target audience is looking for, once they’ve entered the keywords relevant to your website business, and clicked on your page to find the information/product/service they need. Regardless, it re-emphasizes the need for best practice SEO and SEM with your Internet business website.

Unless something changes, or you happen to have an incredible experienced SEM expert, there isn’t much you can do to affect the query refinement process. What you can do to help your website business is follow a well-thought-out SEO strategy of researching the best keywords and key phrases for your niche industry, aggressively seeking out ways to build your online business reputation (through search engine marketing and traditional marketing tactics), and putting up fresh, valuable content that the search engine crawlers will pick up.

SEM Strategy: P is for Pay-Per-Click—Gotta Spend Some $ to Make Some $

Friday, January 21st, 2011

One of the most entertaining jobs of a search engine marketing expert is to manage and optimize the Pay-Per-Click, or PPC campaigns. A PPC campaign involves using paying advertisers to bring in more traffic to your website by paying for strategic placement of catchy, optimized keywords and key phrases in advertising links and banners.

Generally speaking, you pay the people who advertise your website business each time the banner or link it clicked through to your website. This Internet advertising model is based on a real-life marketing model of doing things like paying advertisers to put up a billboard on the highway for your online business website.

Typically, the advertisers will bid on keywords relevant to their target audience, get a Cost-Per-Click, and establish some kind of PPC rate to your online business for these terms. The advertisers might also charge a flat rate. What you have to decide, at this point, is (in the first case) how much you want to pay for a search term, or if you wish to pay the flat rate. Then, you have to monitor your website performance based on how much profit/recognition this term is bringing you, and if it’s worth the price you’ve paid.

If you have a batch of PPC keywords to monitor, you can divert funds to a higher-ranking keyword or eliminate keywords altogether based on your market response. You can also use a tool like Google AdWords (yes, it’s free!) to monitor the success of these terms in your website, and how much money you spent vs. gained by using them.

Now, if you’re a new business trying to do things on the cheap, you may want to wait until you can spare a couple of hundred dollars on this type of a campaign. You don’t necessarily need special equipment, but you do need someone with good instincts for your niche market and an understanding of the keywords, both organic and PPC, that drive people to your website.

SEM Strategy: K is for Keywords—Keyword Researching Outline

Friday, January 14th, 2011

A significant way to strengthen your website’s search results is by identifying the keywords that are bringing in the natural and organic search.

Generally speaking, it takes optimized content on your website about 45 days to get cached by the search engine robots, and about that much time for the new key word phrases to gain recognition in your target audience. You also want to make sure you’re using the correct keywording in your content and as part of your search engine marketing strategy. If, for example, the most popular blog post on your online business website has nothing to do with your company’s product or service, it is not going to help your website performance in any meaningful way.

A good strategy to implement for keyword research is to spend a lot of initial effort on the research and discovery. Brainstorm lists of keywords you believe fits your online marketing profile, and use a tool like Google AdWords to discover similar keywords in positions (locally and globally) you can rank for. Remember, for natural search, you don’t (and shouldn’t) use the top-ranking key word phrases, unless you’re a pretty big fish in that niche industry. Go for a mix of the mid-to-lower ranking words. We recommend ~1000hits/week as the absolute lowest you should go. The goal is to find words that rank, but aren’t overly used, to build your online presence.

As you implement this first batch of keywords, pay close attention to how this affects your website’s Internet rankings over the next few months. Some of the words will do better than others, and your SEO analytics should show which ones fail to rank. It’s a good idea to update your keyword register about once every 4-6 months to help improve your organic ranking.

SEM Strategy: B is for Bargains—They Attract More Customers

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

SEM Strategy: B is for

Because really, who doesn’t love a good bargain? If your Internet business sells a product or service, then your search engine marketing strategy should incorporate some kind of bargains or special offers to entice customers into buying/using you.

There are a number of ways to give your existing and new customers excellent bargains. Some of these methods can potentially help increase your organic search. Affiliate marketing, for example, puts up e-coupons for your website business wherever people do searches for products or services similar to yours. By optimizing your keyword phrases in the affiliate marketing content, you are enhancing the quality of searches for your page, and helping increase your brand awareness among people searching for things similar to what your online business has.

Another way to use bargains to attract customers is through third vendors like Groupon. This business features a, “bargain of the day” and links people to your website from their mailing list and their main site. Depending on your business and area, this might not be a worthwhile investment compared to alternative PPCs.

Finally, the cheapest way to bring the bargains to the masses is with e-mail campaigns and social media. For pennies, basically, you can give new and existing users excellent bargains to promote brand awareness, and sales of your service or product.

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