For the past couple weeks we’ve been talking about web marketing and what you can do to optimize your site in order to rank better in Google’s organic listings and increase your website traffic. This week, we’re going to take a look at search engine marketing and the things that you can do to improve the traffic to your site utilizing search engines. Search engine marketing generally encompasses all of the tactics that are used other than SEO.
These things include:
- Web 2.0 marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Social media
There are dozens of other tactics but these are just 3 of my favorites. Some of you might be thinking that a couple of those bullets aren’t actually related to SEM but let me explain…
Web 2.0 marketing is one of the most powerful SEM tricks because it can help you to dominate more than one of the top postions on Google and knock your competition out of the first page all together. You see, the more websites that you can rank on the first page of Google, the better your odds of getting the clicks. Create pages on multiple web 2.0 sites, link them together, optimize them and watch how all of the pages can dominate the SERPs.
Pay-per-click advertising is one of those things that can require months of experience to understand it so I hesitate to attempt to tackle the topic in this blog post. For more information of PPC, read Aaron’s earlier post on SEO vs. PPC or visit Wikipedia to learn more.
Social media is often considered a tactic unto itself, however, social media can help you to be found on Google. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace are huge. Google loves ’em. In fact, they’re more likely to rank your posts on those sites than your own website. Utilize each of the major social media sites and you can once again dominate the search results. If your listings occupy the first 10 positions, your competition won’t be found. No matter which listing they click on, they’ll be directed to one of your pages. Ultimately, they’ll find their way to your site. It’s a beautiful thing.