Search engine marketing and SEO explained


Understanding search engine marketing

Search results rankings are important since they drive a lot of traffic to your website. The majority of new visitors for most websites come from Google and the other major search engines. People find you because they're trying to find something, and your site emerged in the search results.

So while you can purchase pay-per-click (PPC) ads, seed influential blogs, and work the social networks, you'll get a majority of links from good old-fashioned search engine results. And you can't buy these results. How you rank is really a function of the quality of your site, not how big your web marketing budget.

Search engine marketing explained

Because search engines drive so much visitors to most websites, you want to ensure that your site ranks up to possible in the recent results for all the major search engines. This activity is exactly what we call search engine marketing, and it involves optimizing your site to position higher in these search results.

Search engine optimization

To improve your search engine rankings, then, you need to optimize your site of these very same search engines. This method, not surprisingly, is called search engine optimization, or SEO. Exactly what does SEO mean?

SEO also requires you to organize your site in such a manner that search engines can more effectively determine its content. That also affects web page design there are design techniques that can improve your search ranking and people that can cause the search engines to disregard you completely. SEO is all about hard work and smart design. It's more about the time and effort you spend rather than the money you spend. A bigger budget doesn't necessarily result in better results.

Of all the tools in your web marketing arsenal, search engine marketing provides the most bang for your buck; it's a comparatively low-cost way to get more traffic and generate revenues. Since you can't buy placement in search engine results, your primary cost is the SEO effort itself and SEO isn't that expensive.

In a way, search engine marketing is a great leveler. A small firm with good SEO skills can achieve greater rankings in the search results than larger competitors. It doesn't matter how big the company or its web marketing budget; SEO is more about smart marketing than it is about the money.

So for many online marketers, search engine marketing and the attending SEO represent a major component of their online marketing mix. It's not the only thing you need to do to market your business online, but it may be the most significant thing.

Searching a site like Google, Yahoo!, or Bing is deceptively simple. The user enters a search query, clicks the Search button, and then waits for that site to show a list of matching results. A typical search of this type takes fewer than half a second to accomplish. That's because all of the searching happens on the search engine site's own web servers. That's right; a user may think that he's searching the Web, but in effect he's searching an enormous index of websites stored on the search site's servers that was made over a period of time. Since the user is only searching a server, not the entire Web, his searches could be completed in the blink of the eye.

Of course, the user is unaware of what happens behind the scenes; he simply types his query into the search box on the search site's main web page, clicks the Search button, and then views the search results page when seems like. Where the answers are stored and how they're served is irrelevant.

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Note: This article was sent to us by: Gary Brooks at 03142011

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