SEO 101

For those of you with Websites, but not a lot of experience as Webmasters you may have heard the terms SEO, search marketing, search engine marketing and SERPs, but never really understood what the heck they meant. I’ll attempt to answer some of those questions in this series, SEO 101:

What is Search Engine Marketing?

• Search engine marketing is the methodology we use to get our Websites more visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• There are variety of methods that can be used to achieve better visibility in search engines, which include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), paid-inclusion and link building techniques.
• The ultimate goal of your search engine marketing campaigns should be to increase traffic from search engines listings. I’ve read that the value of first page results on Google searches can be valued into the multiple thousands of dollars. The more traffic you can drive to your site through search engines the less you’ll have to rely on paid advertising.
• In order to succeed at this, search engine marketing campaigns are usually focused on a users search query as a starting point. For example, if a potential customer enters “newborn baby clothes”, and you sell baby clothing from an online shop, you’ll want that prospect to find your site, or a subpage within your site, ahead of other online shops selling baby clothes. “newborn baby clothes” is an example of a keyword term.
• Keyword terms make search marketing a powerful advertising vehicle. It’s the most targeted form of marketing available bar none. What better time to be in front of a potential buyer then when they’re online searching for an online shop that sells “newborn baby clothes”?
• Once this mom arrives in your shop you have to try and turn her into a customer, if not now, in the future and hopefully for years to come. That’s another lesson….
• Determining which keyword terms your target audience are using for their searches is a key concept in search marketing.

I’ve added some links below to help you determine which search terms might generate enough volume to warrant your efforts in building a search engine marketing campaign:

I use Overture’s Keyword Tool to help spot keywords and search terms that generate loads of traffic. Overture is owned by Yahoo! so while it’s not Google it’ll give you a good idea of where to go looking for gold.