When people use a search engine such as Google to look for information, they do so by typing keywords or key phrases into the Search engine’s search box. They will use a keyword or phrase relating to the product, service or information they wish to find.
The search engine will look through the list of websites in it’s database to find what it thinks are the most relevant pages relating to the search enquiry. It usually takes the search engine less than a second to complete the search after which it displays a list of results starting with the page it considers to be the most relevant at the top of the page.
The object of a Search engine marketing is to promote your website to high positions within the search engine results pages by making the search engine think that your pages are the most relevant for specific keywords.
There are two components to any Search engine marketing campaign.
1: Optimisation of web pages and website content.
2: Generation of back links. 1. Optimisation of website pages.
Search engines collect the information on your pages using a special program called a spider or robot. To determine the subject matter of your website, this program reads the through the text and various other elements included in the site pages. When starting to optimize a website, the first job is to identify which keywords might be used by a potential customer who is looking for the type of products which you sell. So for example, if you sell power tools an obvious choice of keyword might be ‘power tools’. However, the keyword ‘power tools’ would cover a very broad range of products from circular saws to lawnmowers. Taking the above into consideration, the customer might be looking for more specific items and carry out a search for ‘electric drills’ or even , black and decker electric drills’. So you can see that choosing the correct mix of keywords is essential. In any case, the job of website optimisation is to make your pages relevant for the keywords which your potential customers will be using to search. There are some important elements on each page of your website which the search engine will use as a starting point to determine the content of your pages. These elements are the page Meta page title, Meta page description a Meta keywords. The afore mentioned elements are part of the html code used to build the page and they need to be optimised with the correct weight of keyword. Meta titles and descriptions must be written well and make sense to the reader as well as having the correct keyword density. Use your keyword too many times in a description or title and the search engine will mark you down, the same goes if you use the keyword too little. So a good search engine optimiser will have the experience to create titles and descriptions which are just right ( like Goldilocks ). Creating the right meta information is only part of the optmisation process, there are many other elements which can be worked on such as optimization of product category names, product titles, product descriptions, product images. In fact the list just about endless.
2: Generation of back links.
Back links are links which lead to your website from the pages of other websites.
The importance of having back links cannot be understated. In fact Google’s whole algorithm ( the complex calculation a search engine uses to determine the relevancy of websites) is based heavily on back links. In basic terms, the more back links that Google finds which lead back to your website, the higher your page rank will be.
These links can be from other websites, blogs, forums, in fact any kind of online resource which provides information.
Of course, as you may have suspected, it’s not quite as simple as outlined in the latter statement. There is also a dependency on the quality of the back links which lead to your website. In other words, if you sell electric drills, then there is not much point in getting a link from a website which sells pet food or a website that sell hot tubs.
What you really need is a link from a website with information about electric drills or something similar and that website needs to have a high page rank or relevancy it’s self and to top it all, the link back to your website also needs to be optimised.
Just as with web page optimisation, a back link strategy should be seen as an on going.
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