Thursday, January 24, 2008

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing - A Guide to A Complete Search Engine Marketing Campaign

By Cheow Yu Yuan


Search engine marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach out to your target audience, thus promoting your products or services. As we are now in the recommendation age, people always seek out recommendation through the Internet, either from blogs, forums, social networking sites, or even search engines.


When a person keys in the keyword "computers" in Google, he or she is most likely looking for a trustworthy computer company to buy a computer from. If your company sells computer, you will definitely want your site to "be recommended" by ranking well in either the paid or organic listings.


To have an effective search engine marketing campaign, you need to utilize both the organic and paid listings on search engines. For a company which is just starting out to optimize its site for good organic listings, it should also consider tapping on the immediate exposure made possible from paid listings. As search engine optimization takes a longer time to show results, company should use paid listings to target keywords that are being optimized at the moment. This will enable you to have exposure on search engines for your major keywords, while your optimized keywords take time to show up in the organic listings.


Once your organic results start to show, you can now either stop paid listing completely or continue to use it to diversify your keywords reach. I will recommend the latter. As search engine optimization gives you prominent listings for the major keywords that are related to your core business, you can now draft out a new set of keywords that you can use to target your individual products or services.


For example, if you sell computers and manage to get keywords like "Computers" to rank well organically, you can now draft out more specific keywords like "Computer model XXXX" to be targeted using paid listings. This will ensure that you cast a wider net on search engines, reaching out to more potential customers for your business.


One important thing to take note before you start a search engine marketing campaign is to make sure that you are able to analyze the result and quantify the return on investment. Therefore, analytical tools like Google Analytics is very important in this campaign, as it will help you to understand how your campaign performs.


With the right analytical data in your hands, you will be able to fine tune your campaign, generating better results every time.



Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of HomeBizGears.com, an online marketing and branding agency.


Check out more about Online Marketing and Branding at http://www.homebizgears.com/


This is a very good article on the basics of search engine marketing. I found it very insightful.

Aaron Aldama

http://airpr23.anzaland.net/


http://www.homebasedbusiness25.com/

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=home+based+business+new+york+city&btnG=Search

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