Sunday, March 28, 2010

Search Engine Marketing - How to Understand Search Engine Marketing

We want to give you a few tips and tricks to help you understand the basics of search engine marketing so that you can drive tons of free traffic to your website right from the search engines at no cost to you whatsoever.

First of all, what exactly is search engine marketing? There are many definitions but basically it comes down to this; search engine marketing is the practice of getting your website to rank well at the search engines based on specific keyword phrases that you target.

Let me emphasize that last part again because it's not about getting your website listed, it's about getting your website listed under the exact phrases that you want your website to be listed under. That comes down to keyword research and there are a number of free and paid tools that you can use to research different keywords to find out which ones get searched for the most every month.

SEM basically comes down to two major factors. The first are on page factors and the second are off page factors.

On page factors deal with all the things that are on your website. The goal is to optimize everything on your website so that the search engines like your site. This is the least important of the two factors in SEM but it's still something you should consider. On page factors include using your keywords in your page title, using your keywords in your meta-description tag, using H1 tags, and creating copy that is optimized with your keywords.

The second major factor of SEM is off page factors and these are by far more important than anything else when it comes to search engine marketing. Off page factors generally comes down to linking. Getting other websites to link to your website is the most important part of search engine marketing and it's what you should focus 90% of your effort on. Keyword research falls under this category as well because the keywords that you choose should be placed in the anchor text of the links that are pointing to your website.

Links are important because search engine view them sort of like votes in a democracy. The website that has the most other websites linking to it wins and it gets ranked better. The search engines figure that if a website links to your website that is a more objective vote that you yourself simply trying to tell the search engines that your website is good.

Of course we could get into all of this in more detail, but basically that's all it comes down to and now you have a firm understanding of the basics of search engine marketing.

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