Articles

Search Engine Marketing - A Guide

This guide aims to answer some of the basic questions relating to Search Engine Marketing, there is no black art or magic wand being waved and companies offering the Number 1 slot on Google Guaranteed should be avoided at all costs.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing or (SEM) when correctly implemented is a service that provides search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN with what they want. Because these major search engines constantly revise the way in which they rank websites, it requires a specialist such as Iconet to help keep your website near the top of the search results.

How Does Google Choose Who Goes Top?

It is often assumed that top Google positions are produced by your web designer adding keywords to your website pages.

Whilst this does help a little, as you can imagine, every other company competing against you will have done the same to their websites, in fact adding the same keyword too many times to a page could actually damage your ranking with Google as they class this as 'Keyword Spam'.

No Black Magic, just Hard Work

Google list the best most relevant websites that match closest to a specific search term. They are the most popular search engine and they profile each website, giving points to a list of elements that they believe make up the basis of a good site.

The more points your website receives, the higher Google ranks your site, however Google will also deduct points if they believe you are trying to manipulate your ranking in an unnatural way.

What Google looks for

Nobody fully knows how Google produce their rankings, it is an ever changing system and a closely guarded secret. However we do know that the following elements are the overall basis of their system:

A Correctly built site with well written pages that Google can easily scan.

Website pages that conform to Google's guidelines and abide by w3c standards.

Frequently changing content.

Big Websites - Google loves content.

External Links from highly ranked sites, but beware, links from low ranked sites could actually damage your ranking.

How quickly can my rankings improve?

Monitoring websites, changing content, optimising code and waiting for Google to re-index and re-rank your site takes time.

Don't expect results in a few days. Don't be tempted into going for underhand or automated methods, whilst these could get your site nearer the top quicker, they will also get your ranking back down as quickly and can even get your site banned.

On the other hand, if you website ranking has not improved within a couple of months, then best bet is, your SEO company is not doing their job properly.

Are you working with your eyes shut?

Many companies want to improve their rankings and website traffic, but have no idea what their current ranking or traffic quantities are.

The first thing any SEO campaign has to do is get monitoring systems in place, from this point, you will be able to see if your SEO work is actually achieving anything.

Being online is now essential to every company, the UK's top companies spend more than 60 percent of their annual marketing budget online, it is far easier for a buyer to search on Google than use any other method.

If you require a website that performs better with Google and other search engines, or you already have a site that is not performing as well as you would like, then call Iconet today on 01527 837 873 to see how we can help to improve your business through increased website traffic.

Simon O'Carroll, Technical Director, Iconet