Search engine optimization is the killer buzz word (and has been) ever since the commercial Internet came into being in the 1990s.  But it’s really only one tool in the box for an integrated search engine marketing campaign.

Search engine optimization is all about letting the search engines find (and hopefully rank) your pages – and there are several optimization strategies.  Some are built around techniques on the page itself, and some are about external strategies.  We’ll cover a bit of both and you’ll see how they complement each other, and how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

On page techniques include keyword placement and “good housekeeping” tips for your HTML code.  Things like putting in META tags (which quickly got bombed into uselessness), and an internal link structure that’s robot friendly.  (Robots are the names for the search engine programs that go tag and link text into search engine indexes).  It’s also the point where you do content optimization.

Many search engine optimization outfits do just on-page techniques. After all, it’s easy enough to run them as “recipes” and make concrete statements that you’ve improved their web site in some way.

However, the external strategies are also important.  Marketing is more than just being ranked high on the search engines, it’s also an integrated process of building strategic awareness of your brand.  You need to make sure that pages link back to yours, and that those pages aren’t obvious link farms.  Social networking sites are now an important marketing tool, but they only work if what you’re doing on them is NOT obvious marketing.

Articles remain an excellent method of marketing your site, but there’s more to writing an article than keyword stuffing – you need to have an article that is informative and entertaining…and all of these are pieces of the puzzle of an overall marketing strategy.

Doing an effective search engine marketing campaign takes work, it also takes follow through.  You’re going to see a jump in your page’s page rankings, and a surge in your traffic and leads, but it’s important to both act on those leads, and be proactive in thinking about where your next marketing push is going to be.  In an information bazaar as crowded and as dynamic as the internet, there’s a constant evolution of marketing and socialization.

Randy Zlobec has been doing search engine marketing since just about when the field was invented, and because it’s a new and evolving field, he has had to constantly stay on my toes, expanding our range of services and products.  He has progressed from the days when you could pack META tags with keywords and grab page rankings for static pages that are so old they have moss growing out of the code to the internet of today, and strives to maintain my nimbleness to handle the internet of tomorrow as well.

What excites me about internet marketing is the incredible potential.  A number of my clients have seen their business volume triple within a week of a well done internet marketing campaign, and this wasn’t for just new startups.  My biggest success story in this field was designing sites for selling real estate; while those hyperbolic growth curves aren’t likely to happen again – you can only be the first company doing a particular thing once, it was indicative of a sea change in how people shop.  For example, most people look for information on big purchases (cars and houses) online, rather than doing it in person or by reading print ads, and that’s a trend that doesn’t look to stop any time soon.

Internet marketing can only situationally replace other kinds of marketing.  Print marketing still has a place in the current industry.  So does radio advertising…but some things are going away completely.  For example, the concept of newspapers making their revenue off of classified ads has more or less been blown out of the water as sites like craigslist and freecycle have kicked in.  And as more companies have acknowledged the effectiveness of internet marketing, the field has grown crowded, and it’s harder and harder to get the top ranked keywords.

Which is why My Company, Myrtle Beach Site Design gives you a free search engine optimization analysis as part of signing up with us.  We’ll try to find keywords that haven’t been done to death and show you how to make a campaign for them.   Think of it as spreading your bets –rather than bid for a keyword good for 200 visits in a month, we can show you how to cover 10 keywords that each get 20 visits a month, and will do a better job of pre-qualifying the interest levels of those visitors.  It’s a more nuanced, and flexible method of bringing traffic to your visit.

We offer the entire package, and can help your company really take off.  If you’re serious about your marketing effort, and serious about saving money while doing so, give me a call at 843-267-2801…