Marketers and the media prefer simplicity. Search engine marketing (SEM) is not, of course, simple. If SEM and SEO were simple, traditional marketing agencies could slot SEM into media plans with little thought or effort. SEO consulting wouldn’t differ from site design.

Yet SEO and SEM have spawned a multimillion dollar industry, even a trade organization, SEMPO. In their quest to simplify SEM, many members of the media and company executives prefer to look at its challenges as a single problem. In fact, a host of variables influence an SEM campaign’s success or failure.

One simplification marketers, the press, analysts, and even some agencies succumb to in an attempt is to drop organic SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) SEM into the same bucket. So let me clarify.

Poor SEO is primarily a problem of several digital hurdles that inadvertently block search engine spiders from doing their job. Spiders are on a mission to:

• Find quality content.
• Identify that content and separate it from extraneous information.
• Grade the content for clarity.
• Extract the essence of a site’s content on a page-by-page basis.
• Grade the content for source reputation.
• Understand the content’s context in respect to the Internet as a whole (assign communities or explore relationships between content and sites).
• Catalogue the content’s URL.
• Keep the content cache fresh.

Generally, 90 percent of SEO relates to removing obstacles to the search engines finding and understanding the content’s essence. Having an under-optimized Web site is like having a broken window; it can be fixed in a reasonable and finite length of time.

Realistically, if content isn’t relevant you can’t achieve long-term visibility in organic SERPs. Sure, black-hat SEO techniques may work for a while. But, a search engine’s mission is to deliver the most relevant results to searchers. You need a plan to remove all obstacles to an engine finding and grading content while understanding its essence.

Once a site is search engine friendly, 90 percent of the site-side SEO work is done. True reputation management, online PR, and content freshness based on seasonal search behaviour, as well as trend adjustments, are ongoing processes that will enhance a search engine friendly site.

Paid SEM: High Maintenance
Paid SEM is very high maintenance, not a set-it-and-forget-it business. Skill sets required for planning and executing paid search campaign management are different from those required for SEO, particularly early-stage SEO, where problem areas are identified and roadblocks to search engine friendliness removed. The technology needed to maintain excellence in paid search is also very different from those required in organic SEO.

Commonalities
What, then, are the commonalities between managing and optimizing for both organic and PPC search? They’re primarily linguistic, analytic, and behavioural in nature. They include understanding:

• Keyword research and cross-utilization of keyword data for SEM and ongoing SEO
• Buying-cycle factors and how they relate to keywords and sites
• Visitor behaviour within sites for organic and paid traffic, particularly conversion behaviour
• Seasonal keyword search factors
• Linguistic analysis of query strings
• Conversion factor analysis

The above relate to improved user experience through understanding visitor needs as expressed by search queries.

Paid search’s true differentiator is requiring a combination of immediate and reactive action. Immediate action is often based on data that are available for analysis on a real-time basis, such as bidding activity. With our industry’s evolution beyond pure search, the number of variables under a marketer’s control is growing. These include landing pages, creative presentation and offers, and additional factors that are different for every business, depending on what specifically drives optimal user experience.

Over the next year, I predict continued competition within paid placement search will result in a whole new generation of strategies and tactics. They’ll take best practices in paid search further away from organic search.

Organic search is simultaneously centred on both the spider and the visitor, with a preference given to the spider (a non-search-friendly site means no visitors). Paid search is all about maximizing efficiency by applying direct marketing principles. Each variable is considered and tested.

What are the chances the same page built for Google, Yahoo, and MSN spiders is the absolute best page for a paid-search landing page? Pretty slim. Spiders and humans have different needs, wants, and desires. Likely areas of divergence include copy length, format, flow, and tone; navigational diversity and priority; and graphic richness.

Organic and PPC search teams will undoubtedly work together. In smaller companies, they’ll be the same person, in the same way marketing directors in smaller companies handle PR, marketing, advertising, and promotion. In larger companies, where both types of search are mission-critical, specialized professionals will be hired, as either an outside agency or in-house staff.

Jupiter Research (a JupiterMedia Corp. division) data seem to validate part of the trend toward outsourcing mission-critical paid search. ClickZ News reported on the recent Search Engine Marketing Agency Constellation report. Analyst Nate Elliot confirms this trend toward professional agencies managing larger spends: “Agencies account for 51 percent of the total spending on paid search — a significant increase over the past 18 months.”

Will the same agencies that manage PPC budgets also assist in organic SEO efforts, or will the specialties diverge due to SEO’s front-heavy workload requirements? Time will tell.

By Kevin Lee

What better way to start the New Year than with more traffic to your web site. Web traffic is a critical part of your internet business and it is imperative that you design it to bring you the most amount of traffic possible.

Designing your site for traffic includes offering good content, easy navigation and a logical flow. Additionally you must also build your site to draw traffic from the search engines because if you can obtain high search engine ranking, you can enjoy free traffic.

It’s important to note, however that good ranking won’t do you much good without a well designed site and a well designed site can’t bring you visitors if no one knows it’s there. Both high ranking and good design need to work together.

How do we pull all this together? Let’s take a look.

-A Word About Design-
A huge mistake I see many website owners make is that they get caught up in making their site cute. They love the little animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds. What they fail to consider is that these things are worthless if you don’t offer good content, easy navigation and a logical flow.

First of all don’t try to be everything to everyone. Design your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don’t confuse your readers with links all over the page. Design a logical flow. Lead your viewers to where you would like them to go. Leave plenty of white space and keep your pages organized. Clearly state at the top of your pages what you are about and what you would like your viewers to do.

Secondly, I don’t recommend pop-ups. I find that the majority of internet users find them annoying. The demand for pop-up blockers is a good indication that viewers don’t want to see them.

Thirdly, offer good content. Provide information on your site that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information that they might not get elsewhere. Write reviews regarding your products. Write newsletters and articles and most importantly offer something of value for free. Give your viewers a reason to come back. It will also build trust in you.

-Traffic Builders-
Good search engine ranking can bring lots of visitors to your site. It often takes a few months to rank well but the payoff is lots of qualified traffic. While it’s not practical to depend solely on search engines for traffic it can complement your other advertising campaigns nicely. Aiming for high search engine placement is always a plus.

Keep these in mind when developing your site for the search engines:

-Domain Names-
Choose a domain name that has your site keywords in it. For example, if you’re a site about pet care, try to include the words “pet care” or words related to pet care in your domain name if you can.

-Keywords-
Keywords require research and there are several tools to help you out in this area. These are my favourites:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

I suggest focusing on only one keyword or keyword phrase per page of your website. This may not seem like a lot but if your site has 20 pages you can focus on 20 keywords. Each page should be considered a landing page for your site. If you have proper navigation on your pages, it will easily allow viewers to see everything you have to offer.

Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your page as well as in at least one header phrase. Also work the keywords into the body of your text as often as you can without sounding redundant.

Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in your page description tag. Many search engines no longer look at the keyword tags, but I recommend using them and including the plural forms as well.

-Alt Tags-
Search engines don’t index images; therefore any text on your site that is presented in image format won’t get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, fill in your ALT tags with your keywords. This will boost your keyword frequency and help your site achieve better ranking.

-Linking-
Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to your site, so it’s important to establish quality, related links. This can be accomplished in a few ways. One way is to establish reciprocal links with other like sites. When exchanging links be sure to include your keywords in your site title.

Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be sure it is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative. I also recommend that the site’s index page have a Google PR rating of at least one. This ensures that the site is not being penalized by Google. If it is a penalized site then you could be penalized as well for linking to it.

-Include a ‘tell a friend’ and ‘bookmark’ script on your site-
This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of all return to your site.

-Include a Site Map-
Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how it’s organized, where it is located with respect to other information, and how to get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible.

Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots. This can increase your chances of becoming indexed because a site map allows the search engines to easily visit every page of your site.

A site map works best if you include a link to your site map in the navigation of every page on your site.

Finally, don’t let your site become stale. I have found that my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add new pages to my site and keep the content new and fresh. Follow these tips and 2005 may be your year for traffic.

By Elizabeth McGee

Sometimes questions will arise around the subject of gateway information pages or doorway ages. People have heard that “doorway pages” are BAD and some have stated that search engines “hate doorway pages”.

For clarification on these types of issues, let’s start by explaining some simple ground rules looking beyond the jargon and terminology.

Do Search Engines Hate Doorway/Gateway Pages?
To answer this we’ll examine it in two steps.
Let’s understand:
1. What it is that the Search Engines “HATE”?
and then…
2. What type of pages the search engines “LOVE”?

With this approach it will help us gain some understanding of the criteria that is most important.

1. What the Search Engines HATE:
a) To put it simply, search engines despise low quality doorway pages that contain little or no useful content. A few years ago these types of low quality doorway pages were rampantly produced as a means to try and trick the search engines. Looking at it from the search engines point of view, why even publish a page if all it contains is a couple of lines of text and an “enter the store” link. Pages with VERY LITTLE VALUE to the reader do not belong in a search engine’s index.

b) Search engines also despise any kind of duplication or use of mirror pages. Again, little or no content (often just garbled text or keyword rich paragraphs that have no real value) were reproduced over and over and cluttered up the search engines. These pages were supposedly going to bring great traffic but the bottom line is that they were and still are all labelled by engines as Spam.

c) Search engines hate any attempt made by Webmasters to manipulate pages optimized with content unrelated to the actual Web site. Some Webmasters were guilty of all types of trickery to try and attract clicks regardless of the site content.

Understanding these issues, clearly you could NEVER blame the search engines for their war on Spam and low value doorway pages which contained no useful content or information.

Next let’s talk about
2. What pages the Search Engines LOVE:
a) Search engines love pages that far “information rich” and contain useful, original content that will actually make valued reading to the online visitors.

b) Instead of doorway pages (or pages with no value or little useful content), the term “information rich” can be used to describe a page loaded with useful, quality information. Search engines love pages that are content rich and able to stand on its own merit. A quality information page is also part of the overall Web site allowing visitors to obtain more relevant and useful information having easy navigation through the Web site.

Instead of lightweight pages with no content, today’s pages need to contain high quality information, which is relevant to the online audience. The information rich page is 100% quality, put together with research, relevance, thought and care. No tricks are ever needed.
?

Next Question is
What kind of information goes into creating an information rich high performance page?
Invariably this question often comes up when I am teaching one of our live hands-on workshops. People need to understand that this is wide open to all the discoveries you make while researching your target audiences behaviour. How you can meet the audience’s needs exactly, is only limited to “your imagination” and the most effective way to present the information you know they are looking for, back too them. You want to give them what they “really want” as opposed to what you “think” they want and do this right up front.

The focus is on creating genuinely “useful content” for your ideal target audience of “potential customers” who happen to be already out there searching for you.

Not only is this what your visitors want, it’s also the key to success for search engine acceptance. You will never run in to trouble with search engines by offering lots of original, quality content that is interesting, useful and of high value, to your online readers.

In brief, key to success for attracting your target audience, is doing quality research on your target audiences searching behaviour and learning to identify their needs and what they are searching for and then, giving them what it is that they really want.

Okay, so what kind of information might a information rich page really contain? That will depend on what “your research” reveals of course, but here are about 20 rough ideas just to get you started thinking in this fashion.

20 Ideas for High Performance Information Rich pages:
Your high performance, information rich pages might be any of the following (but not limited just to these either):

1. A Questions and Answers information rich FAQ page.

2. An introductory story related to the appropriate Website theme (something that is compelling or educational on topic).

3. Interesting and original statistics which you have discovered through your research are in high demand by your audience.

4. An interesting interview with someone (make it exclusive and original). People love to read about other people�s experiences and or opinions and views.

5. It might be a page loaded with various product reviews with an emphasis on benefits of each in comparison.

6. It could be a theme related feature article or story.

7. It could be a detailed tutorial loaded with valuable “How to” or “instructional” advice.

8. Your information page might even be a biography about someone’s life that people are looking for detail on. Of course it should relate to the topical interest of your site’s theme.
Recent e.g. At the recent, sad passing of legendary screen icon Marlon Brando, just do a search for his bio and see all of the movie or film related sites that are no doubt getting additional exposure from Marlon’s fans who are looking to buy up some of his old classic films.

9. Your pages might something with a current events or newsworthy or hard news angle. Your audience is probably looking for interesting news if you take time to study what they are searching for.

10. Your information rich pages might want to contain detailed historical information that your audience is seeking.

11. There may be room for the use of information pages that use some humour or emotional content that is still of good value.

12. Would there be value to having a questionnaire which asks your audience a series of important questions. Remember that like real life, most web based businesses are about building rapport and relationships.

13. You could build an index to a whole library of similarly themed topics and all though your articles would all be similar in theme, each individual information rich page would contain useful and diverse subject matter. Remember high value to your readers but all original (and no duplication in content).

14. What about an information rich page offering an entryway into a useful, interactive section like a message board perhaps detailing terms of use for the message board.

15. It might be a page containing an interesting advice column on your chosen theme. Just old fashioned “good reading” which offers your readers advice or solutions to their challenges.

16. Your information page might be a reference page loaded with interesting, inspirational or famous quotes quite popular with all types of personalities.

17. Your pages might contain a related territorial map (yes images can be used most effectively with text)

18. It might be a sales letter but remember the emphasis is on quality content and originality. Things like detailed product reviews or content that emphasized some value added layout.

19. It could be a community related page with important localized community information. Tremendous value for websites that are looking for region specific traffic.

20. It could be any of the above suggestions with a seasonal angle relating to Christmas, Halloween, Easter, or something else appropriate to the web content within your main theme.

One of the best ways to come up with original ideas is to think laterally about “your audiences needs” in comparison to how they are searching on the major search engines. For more insight on how to research your audience’s real-time behaviours you may want to visit http://www.wordtracker-magic.com.

By John Alexander