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captiva marketing
10805 Sunset Office Drive
Suite 207
St Louis, Missouri 63127

Ph: 314-822-3656
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Ten Tips for Promoting a Web Site
through Search Engines

Strategies for promoting a website will vary greatly from one industry to another so it's impossible to publish guidelines on what will work best for everyone. The following ten tips, however, should help you if you are considering using search engine marketing as one of your options.

1. Understand Its Limitations

To better understand search engine marketing, one needs to grasp the concept of Active vs. Passive marketing. Traditional advertising would generally be thought of as "Active" marketing. Advertisers put their message out in front of a select group of people who ideally represent their target market. Standard medium would include magazines, newspapers, direct mail, tv/radio, billboards, and email marketing. Search engine marketing would typically be considered "Passive" marketing. Like yellow page advertising, it only reaches potential customers who are actively looking for your products or services. Your goal is to simply have your advertisement in the area in which they are looking.

2. Know Your Target Market

The next thing that you need to do is determine who you actually want to target with your promotional campaign. If it is all people who breathe, then running ads on the home page of Yahoo and MSN may be your best bet (if you have a huge budget). On the other hand, if you are simply trying to reach people looking for something like industrial coffee makers, search engine marketing will probably be a much more cost effective option because you can cost effectively target just those keyword phrases that are important to your company.

3. Know Your Geography

It's called the World Wide Web for a reason. If you just want to reach people in your area, look for local directories, optimize your site for geographically targeted search phrases and utilize Pay Per Click programs like Yahoo Search's Local Match or Verizon's SuperPages program. If your products would be of interest to a national or global clientele, search engine marketing can really be beneficial.

4. Study How People are Looking for Your Products

Think of all the different ways that your potential customers may be looking for your products or services. Write these down and then plug them in to a search term suggestion tool like those at Yahoo Search or Wordtracker. This knowledge can help you create the foundation for all of your site promotion efforts. See our keyword analysis section for more information.

5. Evaluate Your Options

Now that you know the phrases that your potential customers are using to find your products, type these phrases into the search boxes at the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). You'll see that you have a few options:

You can buy this phrase through Yahoo Search or Google Adwords and show up in the "Sponsored Results." You can optimize your site to show up in the organic rankings (easier said than done). Or you can inquire about advertising or PR opportunities with other sites that are showing up often in either the sponsored results or organic rankings for your desired terms.

6. Maximizing Your Pay Per Click Advertising Return

If you choose to use Pay Per Click advertising, you'll probably want to start with Yahoo Search and Google AdWords as these two programs dominate the industry. View their networks. Next, you need to consider the keywords you are going to bid on and what matching type you are going to use. Finally, you need to craft your ad titles, descriptions, and landing pages. See Ten Tips for Maximizing Your Pay Per Click Advertising Budget.

7. Optimizing Your Site

The term, search engine optimization, typically refers to modifying your site so that it will rank well in the organic or free search engine listings. Depending on the breadth of your product line or services, this can be one of the most cost-effective methods for promoting your web site. Unfortunately, it is often the most difficult and least reliable. For starters, your site should be built with a search friendly structure...minimal flash, no frames, static links, etc. Next, you need pages that provide information on the keyword phrases you are targeting and these pages should be built in a manner that is compliant with the search engine algorithms. Finally, your site needs to be linked FROM other sites so that the search engines can find your site and determine how popular it is.

8. Online PR, Advertising, & Submission

Earning links from other sites is one of the most difficult aspects of optimizing a site. This is especially true when optimization is left completely in the hands of the IT department. Often referred to as link building, this process involves getting links from other sites, preferably high quality web sites with lots of traffic relevant to your industry. Look here for some ideas on how to improve link popularity.

9. Track, Measure, and Improve

No matter how skilled of a marketer you are, it's nearly impossible to design the perfect search engine marketing campaign until you can actually see how visitors are responding, how they are navigating through your site, and what keywords are converting into sales or inquiries. As the competition for organic rankings increases and bids for the top spots in Yahoo Search and Google AdWords continue to rise, installing tracking systems that allow you to more accurately measure your ROI are becoming more and more important. We utilize both Urchin 6.0 and ClickTracks as our primary web analytics programs. More on web site visitor tracking.

10. Consider Hiring Help

Promoting a site with search engine marketing has numerous opportunities and many pitfalls. A professional firm can help you prioritize your options and design a more cost effective program by focusing on the areas of your campaign that will generate the most return on your investment.

If you would like to discuss your goals with an SEO professional, please call us at 1-877-227-8382 or fill out our contact form.