Five considerations: Rule #3
3. Learn how search engines work
As internet users move up the adoption curve, they become familiar with new technologies — but search has been around since the beginning, and continues to be a primary vehicle to get in front of the most people. Researchers disagree on the exact market shares of the major search engines, but this is Hitwise’s take. Search Engine Land publishes a variety of useful newsletters; Search Illustrated is a good one to follow these basic trends.
For the small business marketer, search engine marketing (SEM) effectively falls into two categories: organic search and paid search. Think of organic search as the results from a typical search query in Google (or any of the other major search engines). Paid search, sometimes referred to as pay-per-click (PPC), is represented by the small text-based ads in the margins. New types of ads (e.g. image-based, video) have emerged in the more evolved PPC models, but the text-based ads still dominate. Google AdWords is the best-known example of a PPC advertising model.
In almost all cases, the best way to establish position is to focus on organic search at the start. This inherently entails several best practices which are crucial to marketing on the internet:
• smart content development and formatting - write for humans but don’t alienate the robots
• generate lengthy keyword seed lists to highlight marketing niches
• use proprietary tools like WordTracker to isolate competitive advantages
In short, these are things you should be doing anyway. They’ll give you the head start you need and improve your chances of successful paid search campaigns down the road.
Finally, it’s not essential to know the underlying search business inside and out, but some understanding of the linkages of content feeds will prove useful. (Here’s a hint: if you can’t put aside time to optimize for every search engine, don’t feel bad about putting all your eggs in the Google basket.)
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 @ 11:13 am on the category Copy writing, SEM, SEO.
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