This is relevant to just about all web marketing. So we have to look at updating our modus operandi. We all know it’s vital that all commercial organisations are on the web. But that’s not the answer to the problem. Your clients need to know where you are.

Picture a new retail premises opening up shop: It’s taken time, money and expertise to get to this stage. It’s opening time, and they’re looking for clients… Then they look outside and find they’re in a rural outpost! Nobody will know how to reach them. What kind of sales do you think they’ll manage? The vast majority of business websites have just this problem.

The World Wide Web has caused a paradigm shift in marketing. Around the time of the millennium, it was thought that having a website was everything. Vast amounts of money were spent on all singing/dancing web sites. This trend was cheerfully encouraged by on-line design companies, who relished the business! But just the existence of the site didn’t bring in the customers. They’d thought that simply having a site on the web meant customers could see them. In fact, this wasn’t the case at all.

Web marketing needs a whole new approach. Traditional marketers would say your site is an advertisement of your products or services. And so to get people to visit the site, they’ll promote it in the press and media, and on TV and radio. Basically keeping it within their frame of reference. They produce the pretty brochure and then market every possible avenue to generate enquiries to send that brochure to. However, this process illustrates an absolute misunderstanding of website marketing.

The World Wide Web isn’t simply a passive display board. It’s a vast interactive tool for people all over the world. We can discover in-depth information, research products and services and chat with others before we buy. The Search Engines – such as Google and MSN (now Bing) – have made this easy for us as customers. They’ve put together massive directories to guide us. Yellow Pages would be a nightmare if it wasn’t indexed properly. How would you ever find what you wanted?

Search Engines have sorted all this. But in doing so, they’ve radically changed the face of marketing forever. Because now, if you want to be found in the vast sea that is the internet, you have to be indexed in the Search Engines. Even that isn’t enough though. Statistics reveal that almost no-one looks ‘below the fold’ on the 1st page.

But Search Engines are interested in making money – so to overcome high rating difficulties, paid advertising was introduced. You Pay Per Click, so you’re only charged for your ad when someone clicks on it. How refreshing was that? Because now you didn’t have to spend anything until an interested person looked at your web page. Advertising in this way requires well informed judgement, but if handled properly it can be very worthwhile.

Alas, the market is bombarded with this form of advertising these days. Prices have risen hugely. This is mostly due to high bids being put in by marketers with no experience. Some words and phrases command such high click prices that profits aren’t possible for many companies. This happens mostly where lots of clicks are essential to get one buyer. So Search Engine Optimisation is now becoming a preferred method for many to get to page 1.

To illustrate the challenge: Visit Google now and search for some of your company’s keywords. Do you feature in the first three lists? Most likely not. In other words, you’re no-where to be found. If the answer was yes, are those terms actually being used by customers?

You could be relatively happy with PPC. But are you professionally managing your campaign? What kind of returns are you getting? Do you measure the quality of each campaign and draw up accurate statistics? Without testing and measuring, you can’t be sure what works best. There will always be an element of guesswork (and consequently less than perfect results) without accurate stats.

It’s very evident today that both global and local commerce are moving swiftly onto the internet. Make the most of this trend. Unless you embrace the internet and utilize all of its advantages, your business will become a dinosaur.

(C) Jason Kendall SEM. Try EvolveSEM.co.uk for excellent information on SEM Experts.

The ever developing skill of learning how Search Engines position sites on their organic search listings is known as Search Engine Optimisation. When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They are not to be confused with the Pay per Click entries. Pay Per Click adverts are generally sectioned off down the right hand side, with a couple across the top of the page. Naturally listed adverts have been taken directly from the index. Algorithms are used to determine the position of a web site in a Search Engine directory.

Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. No-one’s going to find us if we’re listed on page seven. It isn’t possible to say for certain exactly which measures SE’s use to grade sites. The SE’s really don’t want anyone to know – so you can’t manipulate or ‘game’ their system.

As a result, we now have a very skilled bunch of professionals focused on optimisation. On the Search Engine side you have upgraded technological patents being regularly filed. (To cause as much uncertainty as possible!) On the other hand, there’s Search Engine Optimisation. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

Both ‘off page’ and ‘on page’ optimisation is dealt with. In addition there are geographic and demographic factors, but SEO cannot control these. (Off-Page optimisation is examined in an additional feature.)

‘On-Page’ SEO

Adjusting a site’s content to make it friendlier to the SE’s is called On Page optimisation. This is quite straight-forward – it simply requires correctly setting up your site. Factors like: The correct use and density of keywords and internal linking; H1 and H2 header tags and meta tags.

It doesn’t matter if all that sounds very confusing. In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Indeed, it could be said to basically not have much influence at all. Previously we could make an impact with On Page configurations. Not any longer though.

On-Page can still be important though if Off-Page has been taken care of. Then it’s worthwhile to manipulate your web pages and have some internal links.

Suggestions To Take Into Account – Do not START to SEO with phrases that yield millions of results. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s fairly obvious that seventy million competitors is a few too many for someone just getting started.

But… Extend the phrase to Southampton car insurance and it’s under a third of a million. (Relevant if that’s the locality I work in). This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.

We can do much more with this. In point of fact, a phrase like Car insurance would massively set me back. I would actually be competing with the insurance conglomerates! So not a great idea – especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.

Therefore, we’re looking for phrases that yield less overall results – but quite accurately sum up what we do or what we offer. In SEO terms, they’re referred to as Long Tail Searches, as they include several relevant words. Long tail can be anything from two to about seven words long. It depends on your competition. Usually, a long-tail phrase is three or four words.

In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). Then, as we build back-links, we’ll automatically start to gain some ground on the bigger search phrases. Assuming everything goes to plan, we’ll hit the popular phrases in three to twelve months. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. Frankly, we’re only interested in the customers who are looking specifically for what we offer. There’s much more chance these people will buy!

It’s a good idea to spread the back-links around your website. Limiting them to the home page is unwise. We call this ‘deep-linking’ – and Google in particular likes this. Try back-linking product group pages. They very frequently link up to a range of sub-pages, so driving appropriate terms to them can be very worthwhile. So don’t limit the back links to one page. Bing, Yahoo and Google are all paying more attention to the way a website’s pages are managed and listed.

(C) Jay Kendall. Visit EvolveSEM.co.uk for quality advice on SEM Consultants and SEO Consultants.