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search engine marketing tips     by badijones

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Search Engine Marketing Guide

Search Engine Marketing is an essential part of any business that has an online presence. If you have a website, and are not currently engaged in SEM, you are at a huge disadvantage.

If this sounds overwhelming and complicated, but essentially, it's all about driving traffic to your website. Search Engine Marketing Tips can help you learn all about the major components of search marketing, including organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click marketing), SMO and SMM (Social Media Optimization and Marketing).

Picking Up Where SEM Leaves Off... SEM is great, but it's only part of the equation for online success. We need to know what to do once we finally do start driving traffic to our sites.

There are some things that you just can't test without having traffic, like Conversion Optimization and Adsense Optimization. An increase in conversions or click through rate as small as 1% can make a huge increase in your profits.

Organic Search Engine Optimization 

Search Engine Optimization can be broken down into 2 main categories.

On-Page SEO: the process of optimizing elements and contents on a web page in a way that best helps search engines like Google and Yahoo decide what the page is about, and return that page when it's users search for keywords and phrases that are relevant to your site.

Off-Page SEO: the process of building external links, or getting other related websites to link to your site. The best links are those that contain keywords that are relevant to your site in the anchor text.

Do it Yourself
Everyone that makes websites should know at least the basics of organic SEO. If you are interested in learning about SEO, a good place to start is with Google. Do a quick search for SEO Tutorial. You should find plenty of good reading within those results.

Once you feel like you have a grasp of the basics, start to participate in SEO forums and blogs. There are lots of expert SEOs that you can learn from.

Recommended SEO Blogs and Forums:
SEO Refugee SEO Forums - SEO Refugee is a fairly new SEO forum that has lots of active members that welcome new people who are interested in learning SEO.

SEOmoz SEO Blog - SEOmoz is a blog with a large group of members who participate by commenting on blog posts.

Hire an Expert
SEOmoz SEO Services - SEOmoz offers a full range of Search Engine Optimization & Marketing Services.

Range Search Marketing - Services include search engine marketing and optimization, e-mail, newsletter and viral marketing services.

Pay Per Click Marketing 

Pay Per Click Marketing is the fastest, and most straight forward way to get traffic to a website.

Basically, you sign up for a PPC program, like Google Adwords, create a text ad that links to your site, and bid a certain amount for the keywords that you would like your ad to show up for.

You only pay if someone actually clicks on the ad.

Social Media Marketing 

Social Media Marketing is a relatively new field of SEM, that involves strategically submitting high quality content to social bookmarking sites, like Digg.com, Reddit.com, and Netscape.com.

These sites can potentially send tens of thousands of visitors to a website, which can result in thousands of new backlinks, including links from related authority sites.

Do it Yourself
Social Media Marketing can be a highly effective tool for SEM, but if done wrong, it can have extremely negative effects. Members of social media sites tend to be a fickle crowd, and they don't tolerate spam, self promotion, or low quality content. Trying to abuse these sites will get your site banned. My advice would be to just create high quality content, and tastefully suggest to your users that if they like it, they can submit it to Digg, Reddit, etc. If the content is good enough, someone will submit it.

Hire an Expert
ACS Social Media Marketing Agency - ACS is a SEM agency, headed up by Neil Patel, a leading practitioner in the field of social media optimization.

Andy Hagans Link Building Service - Andy Hagans is an expert at leveraging the power of social bookmarking sites for highly effective link building campaigns.

Recommended Search Engine Marketing Books 

I highly recommend these books for those who want to learn about SEM.

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day

by Jennifer Grappone, Gradiva Couzin

Amazon Price: $19.79 (as of 05/27/2007)

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)

by Steve Krug

Amazon Price: $26.40 (as of 05/27/2007)

Words that Sell, revised and expanded edition

by Richard Bayan

Amazon Price: $11.53 (as of 05/27/2007)

Google Analytics 2.0

by Jerri L. Ledford, Mary E. Tyler

Amazon Price: $19.79 (as of 05/27/2007)

Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs

by Harold Davis

Amazon Price: $19.79 (as of 05/27/2007)