Search Marketing
There are two approaches to marketing a website:
1) free organic rankings, and 2) paid options. Free and organic means that a website comes up “naturally” in search results without using fertilizer (paying for results). Unless you’re in a hurry, I usually try the organic rankings first to see how much I can get for free. If you’re in a hurry, you’ll have to pay. The paid options are: pay-per-click, paid placement, and paid position. The downside to paying is that you may never know how many free organic listings you would have received because most people don’t try to optimize a website after they become addicted to paying for results.
Natural Writing Ranks Higher In Organic Search Engine Results
Writing for websites should read naturally in a spontaneous, conversational way. Unnatural writing is contrived, obviously planned, forced, artificial, unusual and unexceptional. It is challenging to create writing that is both unique (does not exist other places) and natural at the same time. Because so many people have tried to trick (spam) search engines for so many years, writing that is both unique and natural really gets the attention of search engines. This balance between unique and natural writing usually requires the services of a professional writer.
Search engines are literally minded
Websites that receive high organic (unpaid) rankings have some common attributes: writing that is unique, naturally written, keyword-rich, well organized on themes, many inbound links from high quality websites with related content, frequently updated, and more than 50 pages of themed content. Search engines are very good at knowing if content is a new written expression or if it is simply a recycled expression of something that’s already been said before. Search engines count instances of keyword phrases that occur on a page which indicates the degree to which a webpage and is organized around topics that concentrate on a theme. Search engines count the number of inbound links from other high quality websites with related content. Search engines attribute higher rankings to websites that are more frequently updated. And search engines love websites with more than 50 pages of themed content. All of the items listed above have to do with words, not the graphic design or pictures on the website.
My approach to Search Engine Marketing
My approach to search engine marketing problem is 1) determine the current rank of the website on keyword phrases, 2) analyze strengths and weaknesses of the current website, 3) with the customer, design an intervention strategy to increase rankings. An intervention strategy may combine organic (unpaid) options and paid options, depending on the difficulty of the intervention strategy agreed upon.
SEO (organic unpaid)
SEO is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. SEO is modifying a web site so that it does well in the organic (non-paid) crawler- based listings of search engines.
SEM (paid options)
SEM (search engine marketing) refers to SEO + paid for position search engine placements such as pay-per-click.