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SEM - Research Measures Success

Search engine marketing success comes from good research. By
applying research to understand your competition and target
audience, your optimization efforts will succeed.

Remember when homework from school often required some research on your part to complete? It is much the same scenario for
search engine marketing: you need to apply yourself by
researching in order to understand your competition and
target audience. Your visitors need to relate to you and
understand your message and what you want them to do.

Know Your Industry

You must spend time understanding the industry you are
trying to make a profit from. If you sell widgets, know
everything you can about widgets: where they come from, how
they are typically sold, why people need them, etc. You can
learn a great deal from your competitors. Research using
industry communications such as online magazines, forums,
newsletters and blogs. Read articles written by industry
leaders and keep up on the latest news about your industry.
The more you know, the better your basis for building an
authoritative website.

What’s Your Point?

Ok, so you’ve got this product you want to sell online. What
are you saying to your audience? Make sure you write in a
clear, concise way so your message does not get lost in the
process. Just because everyone in your company understands
your message doesn’t mean the visitors to your site will.
Have a few test scenarios set up; ask a few objective
readers what they understand from your website and see just
how much your message is getting across. You’d be surprised
that what may be obvious to you is not necessarily obvious
to your website visitors. If you are having trouble creating
a clear message for your website, consider hiring a
copywriter to convey what you want to say.

Know Your Target Audience

Who buys your product and why? Who needs the information you
have on your website? Who would you like to have visit your

website that isn’t already there? Who is visiting you? Are
they professionals who understand your technical terms or
visitors of varying levels who all need the same information
from you? What do you offer that a certain market would want
from you? Take the time to get a good look at what is out
there and how your competitors are presenting their
information to online visitors. Use your log statistics
reports to track who comes to your website. Get familiar
with the keyword terms they are using in the search engines
to find you. Research the domains that most visit you. Find
out why visitors are clicking away from certain pages before
going deeper into the content of your website. Is it a lack
of information? Too many choices to click on? Is the
language used or instructions given easy to understand?
Don’t give your visitors a reason to leave before they
understand your message.

Know Your Competition

Take a good look at your top competition and see what they
are offering online. Even looking at websites that are not
direct competitors may give you an idea of what to offer
your visitors. Think of it this way: someone put effort into
creating those websites. Visit your competitor’s website.
Search in the major search engines for your most important
keyword phrases and see if your competitors show up in the
top thirty search engine results. Learn what you can and see
if what they are doing is something you should be doing.
It’s always good to know if your competitors are using SEO,
Paid Inclusion, PPC, Link Building and other means to rank
well.

Make Your Website Accessible

There’s nothing worse than muddling through a website
looking for what you want and clicking so much you finally
give up. Use easy navigation, make sure your information or
products are easily accessible to your visitors. Create
written text that is easily understood in order to get your
message across readily. Give your visitors plenty of written
information. There’s no such thing as “too much text” when
it comes to search engine robots “understanding” your web
pages. What’s good for the visitor is often good for the
search engine robots.

Do The Work

Research is the cornerstone to your success. The more you
know about your subject, the better you will be able to
inform your visitors. By informing your visitors you build
trust and interest in learning more about your website. Do
the math - get searching!

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing.
http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved.

Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without editing, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is modification done in the web site design, coding, content and/or structure of a web site in an effort to achieve the higher ranking within search engines. Search Engine Optimization are done to attend the highest ranking in the search engine results for some targeted keywords or key phrases.

Search engine optimization can be enforced on the website while designing it or can be performed after a website is designed. It is a technique that can be used to develop a website, which is search engine friendly. Most of the search engine uses a software called “crawlers” or “spider”. The main motive of these software are to check the website create their index (search engine index).

The method of getting search result is different for each search engines. Search engine applies many techniques to index the web pages and include into its directory. So the next time if your web page ranking high within one search engine and not in another then do not bother, it’s because of different method used by these search engines. To rank higher in all the search engine you can do the things which is used by all search engines. You have to track all the changes happened in the search engine operation or method of spider software for getting search results and accordingly modify your web sites.

The process of search engine optimization includes the optimization of the following items:

Analyzing Site
Site Designing
Promotion of website and
Maintenance of website.

Important things to be remembered while Optimizing Your Web Site

A better optimized site rank high. Optimizing a website is not about tricking with the search engine, instead you should design your site both search engine friendly and human friendly. Many people spends lot’s of money and uses latest technologies to achieve the target business by their website, but unluckily sometimes they fail in achieving. So it’s essential to optimize your site in right way, in order to get successful online business by standing ranking-high in major search engines and able to attract lot’s of clients. For optimizing a website always plan a good strategy.

Search Engine Optimization Strategy:

Research your keywords
Check rankings with search engines
URL Submission
The Title tag
Meta Description and Meta Keyword Tags
ALT Tags
Content of the page.
Link building
Search Engine Optimization Strategy

It is vital for every website that wants to stand rank-high in major search engines, to plan a strategy before developing or while optimizing an existing website. A well planed strategy can help in achieving the targets easily. A well optimized site attract targeted traffic by attaining very high positions in the search results.

Search Engine Optimization Strategy can including;

Give relevancy Title

A title is nothing but a focal point of the content written in your page. It gives the main idea of whatever written in the page. Whenever search engine searches for any topic it always checks the title and subtitle of the page first. So it becomes important to give an appropriate title and subtitle, sometimes a relevancy keyword can be useful in Title. But remember it should not be too long, at most it could be 80 character long. A short and relevancy title can help to rank higher in search engines.

Title can be defined as:

Title always follows closing tag and written in Head tag.

http://www.roseindia.net/webpromotion/searchengineoptimization.shtml

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