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Search Engine Marketing Basics

If you're getting started on the Internet, familiarize yourself with these marketing basics, then visit our Search Engine Optimization Expert Guide: Search Engine Optimization 101.

Success on the Internet starts with search engine marketing success.

If you're not getting the traffic you want, there can only be two reasons.  (1) Nobody is looking for what you are offering or (2) your website wasn't built correctly.

If people can't find your site with a search engine, no one will visit it.  Spend as much as you want on banner ads, radio and television ads - tell everyone your address.  They're still going to search for it.  They better be able to find you.

Internet users almost ALWAYS start with a search engine even when they know the URL of the site they want to visit.  Here's the proof: "hotmail.com," "yahoo.com," and "google.com" are consistently three of the top ten most searched terms on the Internet.

Forget search engine marketing tricks and focus on building a quality website.  Before looking for ways to improve your search engine ranking, take a careful and objective look at your website.  Ask yourself, "do I deserve to win?"  Is the competition winning because they are better than you?  If so, then search engine optimization must accompany an effort to improve the quality of your website.

Search Engine Marketing Facts

Search engines are very large databases of information about websites.  The search engine sorts through its database and gives you a rank-ordered list of matches.

The Internet is growing faster than search engines can keep up.

Every time a search engine finds a new site, it dilutes your relevance.  If you want to keep your top search engine ranking, you have to stay relevant by constantly updating your site.

Each search engine ranks sites using a different procedure.

There are many variations on search engine algorithms, and they change frequently.  Trying to "trick" a search engine into giving your site a higher ranking may work for a brief period of time for one specific engine, but the best strategy is to provide useful, well-written content on all of your Web pages.

Being found by a search engine is better than submitting directly.

Build a quality, useful website and other sites will link to you, creating paths for spiders to follow to find your site.  Submitting your site over and over will at best have absolutely no effect on your ranking and will at worst get you banned.

Some search engines cannot index your site if you use frames.

These search engines will only be able to find your site title, meta tags and "noframes" content. Because the content is invisible, these search engines automatically give you a lower ranking than they give a site that does not include frames, even if that site has exactly the same content.  So, you should NEVER use frames on a website.

Several types of web content are invisible to search engines.

Words in images or on pictures on websites are invisible to search engines and do not contribute to your search engine ranking.  Content in Flash or Shockwave websites is invisible to search engines, though AllTheWeb.com recently began indexing Flash content.  A very common mistake we see is sites relying on dynamically generated Web pages.  These pages can be invisible to search engines if not done right.

Software cannot build search engine optimized websites.

If you want your site to compete with the millions of other websites out there, it has to be perfect.  We guarantee you cannot win against a search engine optimization firm if you have a software-generated website.  Building a site that works extremely well across all the search engines AND delivers a potent message requires the kind of expertise available from SEO Logic^® Search Engine Optimization and Placement Services.