What is search engine marketing? September 13th, 2010.
When people ask me what I do for a living, and I respond with “Im a search engine marketing consultant” people normally glaze over a bit until I respond with “I help people rank well in the search engines”.
Search engine marketing isn’t as you are often told a mystical art where you somehow trick the search engines into believing that your site should be at number one. It used to be the case that you could throw a load of keywords onto a site, pay for a thousand links and your site would appear at number one (Obviously you then had a site that didn’t make a lot of sense and would more likely annoy your visitor than help them this was called keyword stuffing, which would now effect your site in a detrimental way). What good search engine marketing is about is helping you focus on what the purpose of your website is and then work to make people aware of why your site is the one to visit for your given product or service.
The search engines are constantly tweaking how they rank sites in the search engines and due to the rise of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook they take into account how your site communicates with its users or prospective customers. What you need to be able to do is offer people visiting your site something they aren’t able to get from any other site in your given profession. There may be a million sites that offer the product or service that you offer but most of those sites are unsure how to focus there efforts.
Search engine marketing should be about engaging with past and potential clients and building trust, interest and conversation. The more interesting and helpful you make your site the more likely you are to have people return to you as a trusted resource. How many times have you landed on a site delivered to you from what you thought was a useful search engine result, to simply click away again within seconds. Web design has seconds to catch your attention and draw you in, it then needs to guide you quickly to what you were searching for and help you make the right choice.
Good search engine work helps deliver a searcher where they need to go on your site and ensure that the information that they are provided with is what they want not just more sales text. I will go into more detail on coming Blog posts about the many aspects of search engine optimisation and how you can help yourself to steer your site in the right direction.
