Search Engine Marketing - Be a Good Librarian
By Lee Roper
When thinking about search engine marketing (SEM) you need to carefully consider exactly what you want to achieve. Increased traffic to your website is the obvious answer of course, but thinking about the bigger picture can make your attempts at e-marketing much more effective.
The World Wide Web is a huge collection of websites that can be thought of in a similar way to a library. The websites are the books, and those books contain pages of information. If a reader is looking for some particular piece of information, they may consult a librarian to help them find it, which is similar to a search engine. One big difference is that you can pay the internet “librarians” to market your website in the form of search engine marketing.
The advantage of the internet approach, of course, is that a search engine can search millions of “books” and return snippets of all the pages that match your query. The downside is that when searching on the internet, you need to know exactly what it is you’re looking for in order to retrieve the most relevant information. Whereas a librarian might be able to figure out what kind of book you are searching for even when you are quite vague, and can still probably find you what you are after, a search engine cannot. Maybe one day search engines will be this clever but that is still a long way off.
Because people don’t always know exactly what they’re looking for, this is something you have to bear in mind when planning your online marketing strategy. If you can predetermine to a certain degree what your customers will be looking for, your e-marketing activities are already halfway to success. Especially in the world of e-commerce, where every visitor is potentially a customer, you need to reach out to as many as you can with a competent and well thought out search engine marketing plan. Think about the content you are offering to your visitors: Is it relevant? Is it optimised for the search engines? How will your customers find it?
Thinking somewhat like a librarian can help you to face this challenge with confidence. Organizing your pages by content, optimising your keywords, ensuring you have enough relevant content to interest your visitors, and placing links where your customers are likely to look via pay-per-click (PPC) advertising such as Google AdWords will increase your web presence no end and could take your e-commerce or internet service website from “just another site” to the next big thing. You should also consider other online marketing techniques such as newsletters and personalized email campaigns to complement your other activities and really boost your traffic.
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