Search Engine Marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your business or web site. More and more people are turning away from traditional business directories like phone books and catalogs and using search engines such Google or Yahoo as quicker methods of finding information. In the near future if a business isn’t online it won’t exist.

Why is search engine marketing important to you?
Google is gaining 60 million new users per month and controling over 222 million unique searches per day. That is over 9 million searches per hour, over 150,000 searches per minute, and over 2,500 searches per second. Over 56% percent of all daily searches are done on Google and due to Google’s popularity, achieving a top ranking has become an instant business validator. By leveraging search engine optimization a small business start up can compete with a fortune five hundred company through successfully targeting a specific group of keywords.

Two Types of search engine optimization (SEO)
1. On page optimization - This referrers to all the factors on the actual page of your web site that can be optimized a certain way to obtain higher rankings. First and foremost it starts with selecting the best and most relevant keywords for your business. There are a lot of tools on the internet to help you do this both paid and free. We recommend the Keyword Selector [anchor this to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools.suggestion] *I need to grab the code off of it so we can make a page on 97 that will do it so we can control all the traffic. Start with your most generic phrases and type them in, the tool will then return how many people search for those words each day plus all specific more targeted related words. This is a really good way to brainstorm and compile a good list of possible keywords to target. These numbers are pulled from virtually all search engines except Google. Google doesn’t release this information to the public. Since Google receives over 56% of searches done each day you can safely double these figures. The trick to identifying good keywords isn’t looking for the biggest numbers it is looking for the words that are the most relevant that will bring the highest return on your investment. If im a mortgage company in San Diego California it would be much more beneficial for me to rank for the word San Diego Mortgage Company rather than the word Mortgage, even though the word mortgage gets twice as many searches.

After you have chose your list of targeted words you want to use them throughout your web sites copy and you want to create different pages for different word groups, you don’t want to try and push one web page on your site to rank high for 30 different un related keyword phrases. See article, “Google Doesn’t Rank Web Sites They Rank Web Pages [Click for further info.]

2. Off Page Optimization - This is what separated Google from all the other search engines in the early years, Google started putting more weight on what other sites were saying about web sites and found that this returned more relevant results. Having more sites link to and reference your site is one of the biggest ranking factors today for all engines. Each link from a site pointing to yours counts as a vote, and the more votes and the more relevant those votes are the higher rankings you will achieve. Relevant links means obtaining links from sites that are closely related to yours. If you sell travel packages in Hawaii you would want to get other travel sites to link to you. There is no use in having a site selling puppies link to a site selling computers and Google knows this and factors it in to their algorithm. There are many different ways to build links such as submitting to online directories such as Dmoz.org, Dir.yahoo.com, and sbd.bcentral.com, writing press releases and submitting them to prweb.com and writing articles and submiting them to article distribution centers such as ezinearticles.com.

Quick results - Natural Search Engine Optimization can be a timley process but it is very cost effective and worth every hour in the end. However there are some other marketing methods to achieving traffic from the search engines right away, this is called Pay Per Click marketing. Google has a program called AdWords [google.com/adwords] and Yahoo has a similar program called the Yahoo Search Network [put cj.com affiliatelink in]. Essentially what these two methods of marketing are is a chance to bid out your competitor for the highest sponsored result in the search engines. If your competitor is paying $1.25 a click to be number you one, then basically you bid $1.30 and you will rank higher. There are other factors that play into this besides just bidding but that is the main aspect of it. Every time someone clicks on your listing and goes to your site (whether they buy or not) you will be charged $1.25. This may sound like a lot of money but both tools allow you to manage your budget and set a spending limit per day and per month ensuring you don’t go broke trying to launch your site. They also have very good tracking methods and will help you track which words preform better this will allow you to adjust your bids to drive more traffic through those with a better performance. This can virtually get you traffic over night, however Pay Per Click marketing is labeled in the sponsored search results of the search engines and get fewer clicks compared to organic and often times bring a lower rate of conversion. Natural rankings should still be in your game plan.

Resources:
ninetyseventhfloor.com/blog - search engine optimization blog
seocompany.ca - list of directories
prweb.com - press release distributor
seobook.com - Great SEO info
Text Link Ads - Relevant Text Link Brokers
97thfloor.com - SEO firm we use