Search Engine Marketing

Your website won’t reach anyone if it can’t be found. Most, if not all, website owners who perfect and apply proven, effective search techniques have experienced incredible growth in customer contacts leading to increased sales.

Put as simply as possible, search engine marketing offers an effective method for generating traffic and making it easier for customers to find you on the internet.  The ultimate goal is not only to get listed, but to be highly ranked on the search engine pages.  There can be a lot involved in achieving success with search engine marketing - from keywords and search terms, to natural site optimization, to paid inclusion and pay-per-click programs on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and others.  The world of search marketing may appear confusing, but it doesn’t need to be intimidating.  A look at some of the basic concepts can help demonstrate some of the ways this powerful marketing tool can be effective in driving targeted visitors to your web site.

The Importance of Keywords
In the same way traditional marketing works to identify target audiences, search engine marketing must ensure that the search engine marketing campaign identifies the correct keywords or search terms used by its audiences…the words and phrases that people type into the search fields of search engines.

The first step, then, is to understand the target audience and know the search terms they are using. These keywords are the building blocks that form the foundation of any search engine marketing strategy. It is essential that they are chosen carefully. These keywords and key phrases should be used in site and copy development, for natural site optimization, and with pay-per-click campaigns.

Copy and Content for Search Engines
The copywriting and the content included on your web pages will have significant impact on how search engines rank your site. Once you’ve identified the search terms being used by your target audiences, those terms can be included in the content of your web site as keywords and key phrases. To successfully rank highly in the search engines, the words on your web pages should never be an afterthought. The copy and content should be considered an investment in achieving success for your search engine marketing campaign.

Paid Inclusion
Paid inclusion is the process of paying search engines to index pages from your site. It has become popular because website owners want to get indexed quickly. With paid inclusion, site owners don’t have to wait for the search engines to find their sites naturally through incoming links and listings in directories. Paid inclusion is relatively inexpensive and is a good option for achieving quick results.

Natural Site Optimization
The results of employing natural site optimization are highly ranked listings that are not sponsored or paid. The ranking or position is not purchased or sponsored. Instead, at Tower Marketing, we optimize all the main category pages to the most up-to-date specifications of the search engines by utilizing over 60 researched methods. By creating or modifying the underlying website source code, we can influence how well the search engines rank the main category pages.

Pay-Per-Click
Perhaps the best reason to consider Pay-Per-Click advertising is that you are able to reach people at the precise moment that they’re looking for you. Plus, you’ll know immediately that you’ve had a visitor and what he or she did when they came to your site, so it’s measurable. In essence, Pay-Per-Click marketing allows you to use your chosen keywords to attract visitors to your site by achieving a highly-placed or preferential position on the search engine pages. Your position is achieved through a form of bidding. In general, when you bid on a keyword, you are bidding on a position. You decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. Google and Yahoo are the two most popular search engines offering Pay-Per-Click programs.

Your Search Marketing Strategy
Each of these search marketing tools is an opportunity to reach more customers by making it easier for them to find you. Ideally, you’ll reach the most people with a strategy that uses as many of them as possible in order to raise you to the top of the search engines.