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.

Question: Given the distortions caused by SEO, can the results of Google be trusted?

Ah, the age ol question, “Is SEO ultimately advertising?”

Given that it is in the best interest of Google, and the other major search engines, to serve the most authentic results in the organic section of the SERPs, (they would lose significant share if everyone thought it was just a search engine of advertisment), I maintain that the results are credible - at least for now.

The results may not always be what you’re looking for or expect, but the various criteria, algorhytmic and otherwise, used to determine the results favor an authentic process.

The question suggests that perhaps organic results are obtained by underhanded methodology, i.e. the way to “distort” a result is to do something black hat. And yes, that happens, so that is a distortion caused by ‘black hat’ SEO. Otherwise, simply optimizing your web pages properly only helps the search engines identify and possibly serve your web page as an appropriate result.

So simply optimizing and playing by the rules in itself does not, in my opinion, lead to the distortion of the results and nor is it consider advertising. Good PR perhaps, but not advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) leverages search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN’s Bing to obtain visibility and highly qualified traffic in the most cost-effective manner.

While most web sites reside passively on the Internet, a growing number of businesses (large and small) have been extremely successful at dynamically leveraging their sites to produce meaningful results and achieve specific business and marketing objectives.

What makes these individuals so successful at attracting customers online? What is it about their sites and their strategy that separate them from their competition? What are they doing right?

The most successful SEO strategies target two entirely different audiences: (1) The Customer and (2) The Search Engines!

Most websites neglect to consider the search engines and thus, their website obtains minimal visibility. That means potential customers will not find you. To optimize your website properly from a search engine’s perspective your site needs to excel in three critical areas. Read the rest of this entry »