What is Search Marketing?

Internet marketing focuses on using the web to increase awareness of your business. The Internet provides the opportunity to expand your audience, since the web has a worldwide reach. Internet marketing drives traffic to your web site where, hopefully, visitors will become loyal customers.

Online marketing campaigns encompass a wide variety of strategies now. At first, many businesses simply put their sites online, and added their web addresses to more traditional media. After the introduction of search engines, though, online marketing changed. The use of keywords is a very important part of marketing, since it indicates that the content on your web site is relevant to what a user is looking for when they perform online searches.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s important that you optimize your web site for search. Customers are looking online for what they want, and they are more likely to find you if your web site ranks high in search engine results. When a potential customer searches online, you want to make sure that the keywords used point to your web site.

One of the most important things you can do is to optimize your web site so that Google can index it, and return search results for it. While Google isn’t the only search engine, it is certainly the most used – and the most important if you want your web site to be noticed online.

In order to optimize your site, you need to include the right keywords that searchers are likely to use. However, you have to make it look natural. In the early days of Internet marketing with the help of search, web site owners engaged in “keyword stuffing,” a practice of using desired keywords as much as possible to appear relevant.

Now, though, Google and other search engines are much more sophisticated. Search engines take into account content, keywords, links to and from your web site, and other items. Google is especially interested quality, so simply writing gibberish interspersed with keywords, or including nothing but sales copy, won’t work in the long term, and may even cause Google to stop showing your web site in search results.

Instead, you need to use keywords in useful ways. They should appear naturally in your content, and they should also be used to identify other elements of your site. Image titles, video titles, and category tags should all incorporate the keywords that describe items potential customers are looking for.

Carefully go back through the pages on your web site and update them, adding more content, adding tags in the descriptive data for the page, and creating more relevant links to useful information. With the right tweaking, you should be able to see better search results for your web site – and possibly more sales.