Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing, also called search engine optimisation (seo), search engine positioning and other such terms, is the service by which your website is promoted within the organic search positions (non pay per click results) of the search engines. Within google, when you carry out a search you are given 2 sets of results, the left hand side (organic results) and the top and left results (the pay per click advertising results). For the purposes of search engine marketing, we are interested in the left hand (organic) results. The pay per click marketing is covered in the section, Pay per click marketing (adwords management).

The search engine optimisation process

To achieve the ultimate search engine optimisation, your website should be designed with this requirement in mind from the start, and so any new website with an online marketing requirement should be hand coded to a specification. Of course, a new website will have a design brief and within that brief will be the search engine marketing requirements. Identifying this need early on allows certain search engine optimisation techniques to be coded into the basic structure of the site, as well as the content of the site, and gives more potential for attracting a broad spectrum of interest to the site.

If a new website is not on the cards, it is worth while investing in an initial website audit to determine the level to which the existing site can be optimised. This will often identify many areas of your site which would benefit from search engine optimisation and the level to which it can be optimised. It is often not practical to make structural changes to an existing site, but many techniques can be used nevertheless to improve the visibility of the website within the search engines. It is also worth noting that optimisation of content only can sometimes achieve great results, as well as attention to elements outside of the website itself, such as reciprocal linking.

The search engine optimisation options are endless, and each project will generate it's own set of rules and needs, but to give a basic list of what can be done to improve a website, we have generated a short list of example techniques and processes:

Key phrase research, unique to the market(s) in question
Key phrase research, unique to the business in question (USP's)
Copy writing services
Key phrase population for web page titles and meta tags
Key phrase population for content and links
Key phrase population for anchor text links
Key phrase population within image alt tags
Key phrase population from external links to your site
Key phrase inclusion in page names
Key phrase population within comment tags
Using text links instead of image links
Not using frames within a site
Not using flash for text content or menus/navigation
Optimisation of navigational elements
management of google page rank
submissions to major and minor search engines and directories
provision of live and historical visitor statistics to monitor progress, and to provide data with which to adjust an ongoing management effort, to cater for trends and stubborn areas of marketing