The practice of search marketing has significantly progressed over the past few years and businesses from Fortune 100s to the two attorney law firm in South Boston, are reaping the benefits. However, still most businesses fail to embrace what is arguably the most cost effective means of marketing and advertising their services by continuing to believe that effective marketing on the Internet is simply having a website.

Search marketing is a continual process of integrating and optimizing various online components. The fact is, there is only so much real estate on the search engine result page (SERP) and we all know that Google is not going to present your website ten times as the only choice. The search engines look for variety. They select websites, blogs, directory listings, social profiles, videos, press releases, PDF files, and just about anything digital that they can index.

Effective search marketing converts searchers into clients by ensuring your brand appears within the SERPs in the right place, at the right time and with the right message. Your chances of obtaining optimal SERP real estate for highly appropriate and targeted search terms significantly diminishes if you simply rely on your website alone. Read the rest of this entry »

Question: Isn’t “optimizing” a website just the task of adding lots of targeted keywords?

Although adding appropriate keywords to any web page is a critical step in properly optimizing a site, it is just one task from various interdependent actions and processes required to effectively optimize any site.

Perhaps the most important factor regarding the “process” of adding appropriate keywords to your website is specifically ‘how its done’.

The most severe ramification for improperly optimizing your site is becoming “blacklisted” by the search engines. That means, your website will never be served in the search engine results. One would really have to be totally negligent or willing to take a tremendous chance for potential short term value to become blacklisted for improper implementation of keywords, but it does happen.

For a more complete answer regarding the optimization of your website, I would invite you to read my article title SEO 101.  Let me know what you think.

A quick and easy way to determine if your website has been indexed or is even being recognized by the search engines is to do a simple search engine index check.

Here’s how:

To determine how many of your web pages the search engines have discovered and indexed use the following techniques. If your website has 50 pages and you see that the search engines have only indexed 25, then you know that half of your web pages are not appearing on any search engine result pages (SERPs).

Yahoo! To determine if your site has been indexed by Yahoo! you will use Site Explorer.  This allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search.

Google: To determine if your site has been indexed by Google, you can simply type “site:yourdomain.com” in Google’s search box. Be sure to enter your website’s domain, and not ‘yourdomain’

Got a question? Let me know if you have any questions about your search marketing strategy.