Monday, November 30, 2009

Another Benefits of Search Engine Marketing

By Ricardo d Argence

In business, many clients overlook the real results that they're getting during Search Engine Marketing.

They look at they keywords, they see what they are paying for, but what they do not see are the many other factors that are affecting the outcome of their site.

When a site gets properly optimized, it is being transformed into a thought-out navigational pattern to information. This is the same pattern a search engine spider looks for. Don't forget, the easier you make it for a spider to index your site, the better your chances are for getting your site a higher placement in the search engine results page.

While W3C validation is something all sites should strive for, it is not required for better rankings. Does it help? Probably. Yahoo engineers have stated that whether a site is W3C compliant or not makes no difference to how it ranks. If it has relevant content, it will get ranked.

Properly naming page titles and file names is also quite important, and it helps the spider out immensely during the indexing. Google doesn't place much value on meta tags, at least not like it used to, but they're still a huge part of the picture. That being the case, don't exclude them.

Once the site has been coded the right way, it is time to use Search Engine marketing. This is used to raise traffic, and there are many different methods. There could be articles, press releases, blogs, feeds, and many other things. It's amazing what can be used to direct traffic to a website.

Here is where the collateral benefits of Search Engine Marketing begin to appear. Let's say that you have been doing a series of press releases where once a week, you talk about a new color of widget. In each press release you also list the other colors of widgets that you have for sale. Even after only the first release gets sent, you've already created a valuable In-Bound Link to your site for your Red Widget, but since you included the other colors of the widgets as well, they all pick up IBL's as well.

If you included phrases about the ways to use widgets, their colors, and other things, then you have also included keywords that you may have never though of. When you check to see what keywords are being used, you might actually be a bit surprised.

Now you've seen just a bit of the potential power that your website actually has. Every page will have it's own rank, and for this reason it's critical to ensure the optimization of every single page on your website.

One other thing that you should concern yourself with is geo targeting. This isn't something that has been implemented everywhere yet, but it scans your pages for addresses, and if you are a brick and mortar business, then having your address indexed by it's geographical location is very important.

In conclusion, the next time you start checking Google to see where your site ranks for it's keyword phrases, don't forget about all of the hidden keywords/phrases that are embedded in your site's copy. You would be surprised at how many of those forgotten about terms end up at the top of the pile....

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