Search Engine Marketing White Paper - SEM Best Practices

Best Practices White Paper Summary

By Sara Pentz for Gerry Grant, CEO/Founder of Search-Optimization.com

ABSTRACT:
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the most effective form of marketing available today., The use of best practices consistently over an extended period of time will achieve maximum results. For companies to remain competitive, a properly built, professionally-optimized website is a must.

It is imperative that marketing executives insert Search Engine Marketing best practices into their marketing plans immediately or risk losing market share and brand equity. Effective optimization is an ongoing process—a corporate commitment, really—not just a one-time purchase. Because the stakes are high it is best to consider using an SEM service provider.

INTRODUCTION:
Best Practices refers to processes that have been developed by businesses to achieve maximum results with an efficient use of company resources. This White Paper is a st art at documenting the best practices for the Search Engine Optimization profession. We will attempt to educate decision makers in the corporate world about why SEM is critical to the success of the business and how to implement it into their marketing mix.

This Paper, Search Engine Marketing Best Practices, will evolve to include information from many sources. It will eventually incorporate web pages, blogs, forum postings and interactive content, allowing others to comment and contribute. The Paper will have lines of sight to additional content by using embedded links and will be available online as a living document. Visit www.search-optimization.com to register for additional installments of Search Engine Marketing Best Practices, or to contribute your thoughts or comments.

Many companies are so happy with their SEM results they do not implement a full search engine marketing campaign, leaving a lot of revenue unrealized. I recommend that in order to achieve SEM best practices, a company’s marketing team, in conjunction with a specialist in SEM, should map out the full extent of what can be accomplished using all SEM “components”—while maintaining a synergy with other marketing efforts.

The plan should include:

• Keyword market research and analysis.
• Strategic pay-per-click (PPC) program management and media buying. The right combination can reduce per-visitor costs by up to 40%.
• Website redesign and editorial search optimization--the two most powerful and effective methods of quickly increasing search engine visibility and achieving higher rankings.
• Analytics and ROI tracking to identify the most effective search engines, phrases, and keywords that allow you to track campaign activity and results in extraordinary detail.
• Powerful, interactive email campaigns capture your target visitors’ permission to send additional information.

As with traditional marketing, search engine marketing best practices begins with in- depth market research and benchmarking.

The biggest search engine marketing mistake is made right from the beginning—choosing the wrong target keywords or key phrases.

Keyword market research and analysis is the foundation of SEM best practices, including brainstorming keywords, phrases, and synonyms, assessing key-phrase popularity, and identifying related or industry-specific words. One must identify key-phrase popularity and related or industry-specific words—these will be the most popular, targeted, and convertible search terms.

Strategic Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program management and media buying provide an immediate method of delivering visitors to your site with placement and top rankings on Google, MSN, and Overture, plus a number of other high-quality, lower-cost PPC search engines. Writing targeted titles and descriptions for your keywords and key phrases, and developing targeted landing pages to give your site multiple points of entry will dramatically improve your PPC results. These landing pages also need to be optimized to attract natural traffic and increase your PPC results. To extend your budget even further, it is important to “blend and balance” placements on higher-priced PPC search engines with listings on less-expensive search-engine accounts. The right combination can reduce your per-visitor costs by up to 40% or more.

To maximize ranking, visibility, frequency, and reach, a specialist needs to address the following:

• Strategic Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program management and media buying.
• Conduct extensive keyword market research.
• Develop search-term-specific, keyword-rich landing pages.
• Select the most popular, targeted, and convertible search terms.
• Identify which keywords/keyword-specific phrases are most effective.
• Conduct continuous, industry-specific linguistic research.
• Coordinate all traditional marketing with SEM efforts.
• Use PPC strategic information in your SEO efforts.
• Set up web analytics including click fraud monitoring.
• Maintain a database of registered visitors and customers, allowing targeted communications and page delivery.
• Develop powerful email campaigns for bulk distribution or to a client base.

Website redesign and editorial search engine optimization are two of the most powerful and effective methods of quickly increasing search engine visibility and achieving higher rankings. Proper site design, page layout, and navigational setup will improve visitor satisfaction and increase revenues. When combined with today’s sophisticated analytics, you will even know what is working and what is not.

SEO Best Practices Research

• Determine how well search engines find and interpret the website’s content.
• Find out if you’re blocking the search engine spiders.
• Create a competitive website analysis to uncover details of your top ten competitors’ ranking strategies and the actions you can take to offset them and gain an advantage.
• Create a search visibility report that tracks a search-engine “spider’s” perspective of your site to reveal blocks, dead ends, and overall “spider” compatibility.
• Run a search saturation report to see how many page listings you have with the major search engines
• Create a keyword density analysis report that shows which web pages aretelling search engines by analyzing keyword frequency.
• Establish a keyword effectiveness indicator that reports the number of web pages competing for selected keywords on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Record current sales volume.
• Create a current server log report to see how many unique visitors your site has.
• Run a keyword ranking report to reveal a website’s top 30 rankings, per keyword, across the major search engines.
• Use a link popularity report to identify those who are linking to the website in order to calculate how many major search-engine links currently point to it.
• Optimize all website images using keywords in names, links and other design techniques.
• Write or re-write copy to create “topical community” to make it “search-engine friendly.”
• Develop search-engine-specific, keyword-rich pages.
• Manually submit site information to major search engines. Seed listings with links from already listed pages and sites.
• Prepare the site for submission to top directory listings, including Yahoo and D MOZ.
• Develop customized thematic linking strategies and link-popularity programs.
• Implement an ongoing PR campaign using optimized press releases.
• Produce an ongoing business Blogs and Podcast projects.
• Submit articles and white papers to online sites and eZines.
• Correct all broken links and create a custom “page-not-found” document
• Create a Google site map and optimized site map
• Provide continuous, secure, uninterruptible, scalable web hosting.
• Install a search appliance on company server to improve on-site search results.

Note: The sales volume, server log report, search saturation report, keyword ranking report and the link popularity report are all excellent benchmarks to evaluate future success.

Best practices SEM requires a market researcher with knowledge in linguistics, a professional copy writer with a knowledge of SEM, including thematic linking and topical community, a graphic artist, a database manager, someone knowledgeable in creating dynamic websites, a PPC management expert, a web analytics expert, a linking strategy expert and a project manager, all with a knowledge of marketing.

Research indicates that it is better to retain the services of a full- service search engine marketing agency rather than attempt to implement SEM in-house. A recent survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa found that in- house SEM efforts produced an average increase of 38% after six months, a very respectable increase. This was compared to the results from outsourcing to an SEM service provider that achieved a more than 100% increase in visitors.

An Orange County Internet Marketing Company

Established in 1994, Search-Optimization.com is an Internet marketing firm dedicated to making clients’ websites work smarter. That translates into more qualified site visitors, enhanced profitability and maximum Return On Investment (ROI). Our clients are medium to large sized to multi–million dollar corporations, advertising agencies, PR firms and the clients they serve.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994.

Additional Resources available at www.search-optimization.com.