A brief description of Search Engine Marketing

It is clear that having a website only is not enough to win in the online business; because there might be thousands of websites in your industry which sell similar products or services like you. Like any offline business advertising is a crucial step here too. It doesn't matter you produce the best product than your competitors in the industry and people don't know about it. Likewise, it is not enough building a wonderful website. People should know that you exist. Therefore you need to spend a significant time in order to market your website.



There are different kinds of online marketing strategies to advertise your website. Among them Search Engine marketing is a major advertising technique by which you market your website through different Search Engines. People usually go to search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc to search for the information they need. Therefore your website should be among the high ranked sites appeared in your potential customers search terms. For example, if you sell T-shirts, your website should rank higher when a potential customer types the word "T-shirt" or "To buy a T-shirt", or some related search term or search phrase (technically it is called Keyword or key phrase) in the search box.



Search engine marketing (it is usually called Search Engine Optimization (SEO)) is the first and vital step you have to do to advertise your website. So, how are you going to do it?



Search engine optimization begins on your website's individual web pages. Each page you design should have a full self elaborative keyword based Title tag (Average 10-12 words) , Meta Keyword tag which contains the major keywords which uniquely identify the page and Meta description, a keyword based description which summarizes the whole idea discussed inside the page (Average 50-70 words). The title you write in the Title tag appears on the top of your webpage when opened by an Internet Browser such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, etc



If each of the individual web pages in your website has the above Title, Keyword and description tags implemented correctly, that means you did the first and basic step of your website's SEO perfectly. Then the next step is to give your website's URL for the major search Engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. It may take weeks up to months for the search engines to come and see (technically it is called to crawl) your website. So, be patient. Do not give your site's URL now and then. Give them once and be patient at least for a month or two.



After accepted by the search engines build links to your website. Building links means you give links to related websites from your site and others link to you vise versa. To do this, give your URL to online directories (there are free and paid directories), participate on your industry specific forums, write articles about your services or products and give them to online article directories, write press release and give it to different Press release sites and participate and advertise yourself on social media sites like face book and MySpace. All the directories, the forums and the press release sites will give you a back link when they accept what you offer them.



The above techniques if done properly will help your website rank high in search engines. However, I have to tell you one very important thing here. SEO is a process. It is not an overnight phenomenon. It needs time to see good results. You may not see rewarding results soon. But your hard work will pay you back if you only are patient enough.