Unlimited Visibility: Search Engine Marketing

Getting your message out to your potential customers and getting them to purchase your products or services is what marketing is all about. Today, many businesses are turning to the web to get their marketing message out. The internet is a highly-targeted and economical advertising platform. The single most common way that people find out about new products and services is by searching in one of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Staying on top of the latest search engine best-practices requires constant education, testing of theories and refinement of techniques. Let the SEO experts at AET show you how to get the highest search engine rankings and visibility on the web without the hassle.

To make sure your website is being seen by all your potential customers, request a quote for SEO services, contact AET today at 800.309.7298 or contact us via email. Your potential customers are trying to find you right now! Make sure they do with Search Engine Optimization services from AET.

Search Engine Basics

There are two kinds of listings on the major search engines:

Organic listings
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) listings

The listings that are most trusted by search engine users are the organic listings and they are ordered through a mathematical ranking system. Organic rankings are a result of proprietary algorithms of the search engines and are different for every search engine. Rankings are reshuffled on the search engine’s own schedule as it "spiders" the web. Organic updates can sometimes take months to show up in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Pay-Per-Click or PPC listings are paid for by those who advertise.These listings are at the top and right-hand side on Google and Yahoo.

So how can your website organically attain "high rankings" and lure potential customers? The process of attaining high search engine rank is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Online Marketing Considerations

So how do you achieve visibility in the major search engines? There are many right answers and just as many wrong answers to this question…indeed many books and seminars are being sold right now on this very topic. One thing is for certain: anyone who thinks they know it all really hasn't been keeping up: the field of SEO changes daily.

Nearly all of the traditional answers to SEO are at least partially correct: make sure your website copy is good and that you have plenty of it, make sure your pages are correctly-titled, contain valid XHTML, make correct use of your key phrases, have accurate meta tags, etc., etc.

But many other considerations are far less obvious.

For example: it is rumored that Google ranks a website higher in proportion to the number of years your domain is registered. The theory is that you're on the internet to stay and thus, more serious about being found (i.e., not a fly-by-night operation). This one factor might figure into Google’s formula at a rate of .005%. Or it might not. Why don’t we know for sure? Because Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc. don’t publish their algorithms in order to prevent people from trying to “game” the search engines. An example would be a page that is supposedly for a charitable organization that really dumps you onto a gambling website.

Your Competition Wants High Search Engine Rankings Too

If you can get better rankings for your website, so can your competition...if they're paying attention to the competitive landscape. Fortunately for you, many businesses still treat their website like a marketing backwater and ignore them completely once they're "built".

If you can get better rankings for your website, so can your competition...if they're paying attention to the competitive landscape.

You may find yourself in a market segment with loads of online competition. If we sold special gloves for Norwegian forest cats that prevented frostbite we could build a website that would get ranked #1 within a few days because it's so "niche". Fortunately, even in heavily-contested markets there are techniques that can be employed to impart more niche-like search engine behavior to your website.

Accelerator Enterprise Technologies is a good example of a very competitive business model. SEO service providers want to be highly-ranked because that’s one of the obvious ways to showcase their talents. But in a race where everyone wants to be first for “search engine optimization” (or choose from a zillion others) there can obviously only be one first place, one second place, (etc.) Thus, the idea is to “specialize” on more specific keywords.

Attaining High Search Engine Visibility

Many Search Engine Optimization consultants say they’ll get you #1 rankings. The good news is they probably can. The bad news is that you'll probably only get a #1 ranking for your own business name.

Think about it: if you were a potential customer of a business and you knew that business already existed and knew the name why would you be searching for it on Google? Well, perhaps you're lazy and haven't written down the phone number. However real SEM efforts are targeting those who don't know the businesses they're searching for exist.

Try typing in your own business name into Google. You may already have a "#1 ranking". If you don't, your website is severly search engine hostile. You need help!

One of the best ways to get organic rankings is to get other ranked and relevant websites to link to you. This idea formed the very foundation of Google's Page Rank algorithm in the beginning. If you know of a website that might link to you (say, your local Chamber of Commerce) it would be a good idea to ask if they would link to you. In our experience this is difficult unless you’re paying someone (such as joining the Chamber of Commerce), which is why it carries so much weight in the rankings. People often “trade” links too ("I’ll link to you if you link to me").

Unfortunately this kind of legwork usually must be done by the client (that’s you) in order to have any chances of succeeding because it's the personal and business relationships that matter the most to those other websites and the businesses who run them. When you do get these links, the search engines still have to spider the site that’s pointing to you and re-rank you. That takes time as well.

Assuming you don’t have the budget to PPC for a very common phrase, one good idea would be to start a PPC campaign and optimize on the types of products or services that you offer which can be made more specific. For example, if you were a direct mail marketing company instead of "direct mail" you could optimize for “direct mail golfers” to advertise your golfers direct mailing list. While you likely have products or services that are more general, you can still figure out where other keywords and phrases could be used to target your potential clients. Your own knowledge of your business and your clients is your most effective weapon here. What is the profile of your “classic” customer? You might think this is Marketing 101 stuff -- funny how SEO really comes back to that. That’s what search engines want.

AET: Making Your Brand Visible on the Web

Staying on top of the latest search engine quirks and best-practices requires constant learning, testing of theories and refinement of techniques. Let the SEO experts at AET show you how to get the highest search engine rankings and visibility on the web without the hassle.

AET

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING