SEM - Search Engine Marketing -
What the heck is this?

There are 600 million to 1.5 billion searches done on the web daily. Your site can be hard to find unless you do things that will help increase your rankings when people are searching the web.

Of the top 10 criteria google gives for getting ranked, 7 of those 10 have to do with links TO your site. PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, closely monitored, are our best bet for getting higher rankings on this site.

Below are some tips and tricks for getting more out of marketing your website.

Buy Google Ad Words

Google ad words ranikings are based on three critieria...

1. BID (how much your bid for the word is)
2. CTR (click through rate your link already has)
3. Quality Score (how relevant the page you are linking to from the keyword is)

Tip: Meta Descriptions

Should be NO MORE than 120 characters. Should be a benefit statement with your keywords mentioned early in the statement.

Tip: Meta Tag Keywords

• Should be NO MORE than 10-12 words, 200 characters. These keywords MUST appear on the page displayed or spiders will discount and your rankings will be hurt.
• DO NOT put competitors's names in your keywords, can be sued.

Tip: Content

• Needs to be fresh and relevant. It is better to ADD content than to replace existing content as this has to be indexed from scratch
• Body copy should be 250-600 words of UNIQUE content with 4 to 5 occurrences of your keywords.
• H1 tags are looked at and considered to be more relevant than H2, H3, H4, etc tags
• There are "no index" tags that can be placed around content. This causes the spiders not to index content. This can be useful for non-unique content on a site.

Tip: URLs

Put keywords into your URLs.

Tip: Navigation

• Landing pages have become defacto home pages. It is better when buying keywords to have a landing page for them to go to with exact relevant information to that keyword than to just to go to your home page.
• Try and stay at 5 tiers of navigation so that spiders to not come to your site and die
• Try to not use much javascript as it slows down spiders.

Tip: Flash

Minimize use of Flash as it does nothing for indexing or site ranking.

Tip: Page Titles

• Should contain keywords, company name, location or region
• Keyword should be early (first) in page title.
• Should contain 8-10 words, 52 characters.

Helpful Tools for SEO and SEM

http://marketing.networksolutions.com/seminars
- here you will find a list of webinars on topics like PPC advertising, SEO, etc

http://nichebotclassic.com/
- Free keyword search term tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- Free keyword search term tool

http://marketing.networksolutions.com/web-promotion-tools.php
- Free tools for SEO - including a spider emulator (GREAT tool)

http://www.sitemaps.org/
- information about creating XML sitemaps

http://www.dmoz.org/about.html
- a good place to get a good, non-reciprocal link to your site

http://www.auditmypc.com/
- free tools including a sitemap generator