by Kris Ritter

Created on: August 19, 2008   Last Updated: August 25, 2008

A Search Engine Marketing Strategy aims to maximise your website's performance as a marketing tool and consists primarily of two elements; search engine optimisation (SEO), which focuses on achieving the best possible search engine rankings to drive visitors to your site, and converting those visitors into customers once they arrive.

To ensure your site appears prominently in relevant searches, it is important to know how each of the major search engines algorithms work; how they rank and rate a site based upon its content and design and how they deliver those results back to users based on relevance to the entered key words or phrases.

Most search engines provide this information freely. For example, Google have articles, such as their Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer .py?answer=35769), information on creating 'Google friendly' sites (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer .py?answer=40349&ctx=related), and advice on SEO and what to avoid (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer .py?hl=en&answer=35291).

For your site to be effective, therefore, you must know what keywords or terms your prospects will be searching for, and ensure your copy includes them so that they can find you in the first place. That said, do not write copy or including pages solely for the benefit of search engine bots; You should write copy for your customers and prospects! Remember, getting visitors to your site is only half the battle. Turning them into customers is your ultimate goal.

There are no set numbers as far as how many words you need to have on a page for it to be able to rank well, but it is generally considered that less than a couple hundred words simply leaves the search engines with too few words to find "dominant" keyword phrases and believing that your page isn't about much of anything.

Most search engines factor in the popularity of your site by looking at external links to it from other sites. Therefore, you should be looking to promote your web site as widely as possible, and trade links with other industry web sites. Of course, providing useful, high quality, relevant content is what will ultimately entice other sites to link to yours!

Do not clutter up your professional web site with 'free-for-all' links or promote your business site to every free-for-all directory you can find to improve your rankings. Good quality links to information relevant to the contents of the page are far more effective than a vast quantity of irrelevant links.

In fact, never employ ANY methods to cheat a search engine into giving your site a higher rank than it deserves. Attempting to manipulate or deceive a search engine runs you the risk of your site being removed from their listings entirely.

In short; it's all about quality - a high quality web site with high quality content and high quality links will give you high quality results as a marketing tool for your business!

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