Search Engine Marketing Made Simple
Posted: January 7th, 2009 | Author: Travis | Filed under: Search Engine Marketing | Tags: internet marketing, marketing your website, niche marketing, Search Engine Marketing, search engine ranking, SEM | 1 Comment »I started SimpleCosmos.com as a way to provide useful, real world tips to those seeking internet marketing advice. Internet Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. It is easy to get caught up in the technical aspects of marketing your internet site but what it really comes down to is a series of simple tasks. Today’s post is about search engine marketing and, guess what, its simple.
The Three Pillars of Search Engine Marketing Success
1) Focus.
Target the keywords and key phrases you value the most. These are the heart of your internet marketing campaign. If you don’t know the keywords that you want to target to attract customers, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If they wanted to find your product or service online, what would they type into the search engine? I suggest you focus on 3 or 4 key phrases to get started.
2) Content.
Write solid content that your users will find helpful and search engines will find relevant and unique. They say “Content is King” and they are right. Without relevant and unique content built around your key phrases, its unlikely you’ll reach your search engine ranking goals. Write technical documents about your products, write sales pitches for your products, write articles about the benefits of your product, write about recent news in your industry, write about the history of your product, write about case studies of customers using your product, write, write, write. Search engines are great at processing your data and using it to establish relevancy and authority of your site. If you write high-quality, relevant content, you’ll be rewarded.
3) Links.
Build links to your content. Get involved in forums and message boards that discuss your topic, write articles that link back to your site and share them with industry publications, add yourself to free directories, ask other sites in your industry to link to you, etc. Every link to get to your site is a vote for you. More links = More Votes = Better Search Engine Ranking.
If you can master the three steps above, you’ll be miles ahead of most businesses on the internet. I know the three steps above look simple but they work. The search engines really have one goal in mind, they want to provide the most relevant results to their users. If you have a great product, focus your efforts on your key phrases, write great content on your topic and build authority through linking and site promotion, you will start seeing results in the search engines. Yes, its extremely competitive out there, especially in some highly profitable industries. If you’re in an industry with a lot of competition, narrow your focus to a specific niche. Focus on your niche and attack it with everything you have. If you master that niche you can move on to others. Remember, keep things simple. Quality content, laser focus on your key phrases, link building. It is simple.
[...] 2) Alexa.com – A lot has been said about how simple it is to trick Alexa ratings but, at the end of the day, they are still a decent yardstick for putting a simple number on how your website ranks against your competition. The whole process is very simple, just visit their site, enter the URL of your site and they’ll give you a number. Maybe it’ll be 10,000,000, maybe it’ll be 100,000, maybe it’ll not even register at all, but the point is that you’ll get a number. When you compare that against your competition, you can quickly get an idea of just what kind of competition your facing. The core of Alexa’s ranking system is based on users using the Alexa toolbar that visit your site. While there are a *ton* of users with the Alexa toolbar installed, their metrics aren’t the gospel. Take them with a grain of salt, but the point is to measure how you rank against your competition and work on the basics to improve your search engine rankings. [...]