SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION & MARKETING OVERVIEW

There are basically two types of Search Engine Marketing, one of them is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, and SEM, or Search Engine Marketing.  SEO is referring to massaging the content of your web site and then getting the search engines to index it based on that information.  SEM refers to getting your site in the search engines using paid advertising campaigns.

Let's talk about SEO first . . .

How do search engines rank your web site?

There are general rules search engines follow while determining the value of your web site. Search engines look at the following information and the keyword phrases within them to determine where your web site will rank (listed in order of importance):

Title-tag: the text that appears at the very top of a web page, usually set apart in a blue heading and that is placed between the tags on a web page.  You can modify and change these using under the content section of your Premier Site administration area.

Headings: these are the headings or titles that you usual put in your web pages to highlight topics throughout your site.  You can create heading in your site by highlighting text and selecting the "Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3... Heading 6" options in the toolbar of your Premier Site content editing tool.

Site Content: the content throughout the pages of your site; particularly the first paragraph.

Image ALT-tag: "alternative text" is used to describe images. When you mouse over an image, this is the tag that appears.  These can be easily added when using the image insert function of your Premier Site content editing tool.

Hypertext Link TITLE-tag: text in a web site that takes consumers to another web page when clicked. It's a word or set of words inside an "a href" "title" tag. You can modify the title tag of these hypertext links when creating them with your Premier Site content editing tool.

META-tags: these are pieces of text placed in the header of a web page. Text in a META-tag is used to describe the page.  You can modify and change these using under the content section of your Premier Site administration area.

Relevant Inbound Links: refers to the number and quality of content-relevant web sites that link to yours. It is very helpful to contact other industry related companies and try to arrange to get links to your site from theirs, sometimes you'll need to put a link back to them in exchange.  The more sites that link back to you the more popular the search engines think your site is.  Remember that they must be from relevant industry related sites however.  The search engine programmers have created automated algorithms that compare the keywords and information of the site containing your link with the keywords and information in your site to determine if the sites are related.  Links from unrelated sites won't hurt you, but they won't help either.

How can you submit your site?

Well, there are basically 2 ways to do this at the moment.  The first is by simply submitting your URL or web site address to the search engine; most of them have a page specifically for this purpose.  The second option is to submit a Sitemap.  These sitemaps are XML files that basically tell the search engine where your pages are in your site and how often they change.  This is extremely useful for sites that have difficult to find URL's.  The results of both methods rely on the optimization efforts from the above section.

Now let's talk about SEM . . .

What types of Search Engine Marketing are at your disposal?

There are many different type of programs available to market your website with paid online advertising campaigns, which are what we refer to as "Search Engine Marketing" or "SEM" campaigns.

We think that there are basically three different types of paid advertising: 

Pay Per Click: which is how most of the major search engines handle the ads down the right hand side of the search results or typically the first 3 to 5 results at the top of the page.  Sometimes labeled as "Sponsored Results".

Paid Inclusion: is mainly a Yahoo! service at the moment and basically is just a way of getting your site indexed faster.  This can be very useful for site that have rapidly changing content that they want to get indexed more quickly than the standard methods.

For more details about each individual search engine, please click on the links to the left for more information about these search engines.