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Search Engine Marketing
by Kathy Robey

Search engine marketing is key in any type of website marketing plan. Having a well designed, well organized site is great, but not as effective if no one can find it! Investing a little bit of your time and money can go a long way in increasing overall sales and bringing in more customers.

It can take some time for Google and other search engines to naturally find and index (list) your site. In general, Google especially will find your site. There are a few things you can do right away to help with getting found, and with getting ranked higher.

1. SEARCH ENGINE SIGN UP: Visit the major search engines where you would like to show up and sign up for webmaster accounts and/or register your site with them. Another thing to do is something relatively new that Google is doing called Google Local. You can go in and set up a Google Local account to get yourself listed in their free business directory. (We can also do this for you at an hourly charge.) This will likely help with general rankings as well. Keep a look out for other programs and opportunities like this to spread the word about your site at Google and other major search engines.

2. SEARCH TERMS IN YOUR TEXT: Consider the major words or phrases that people might type into a search engine when you want your site to show up in the list of results. These are your key search terms. Try to weave these key search terms into the text of your site, and put them on many of your pages. These should still be "readable" within the text -- not just a list of words on a page. Itapostrophes important that your pages still look good and are useful to human visitors.

3. OTHER SITES LINKING BACK TO YOURS: Get other sites to link to your site: It can be very important to have other sites link to yours. The more other sites that link to your site the better, especially if they are somehow related to your business, field, industry, or profession – this can really help your rankings in Google and help boost you ahead of others. It also helps human visitors find you while they are surfing other sites. Itapostrophes important that links from other sites are actual, clickable links that bring the visitor to your site. Itapostrophes even better if theses links have some of the key search terms in it or around it. For example, "Visit this site [your site address] they are great for [your business service or products] and we use them for [more key terms and testimonial about your business]."

To get other sites to link to yours you just need to ask the site owners, or look for places that larger sites have to let you create a link yourself. Often site owners will want to trade links: you put a link to their site on your site, and theyapostrophell do the same for you. Putting a link on your Goozmo site is easy to do using the Text Editor tool "Insert/Edit Link". Create a list of all the people and sites who might put a link for you and start contacting them. This can include suppliers, associations, groups, customers and clients, business associations, shows, events, venues, etc. -- basically anyone and everyone that is somehow related to your business or industry.

4. KEEP YOUR CONTENT FRESH & ADD TO IT: It is very important to keep the text content on your site fresh, as well as adding new pages and new text. It’s often good to keep old content around in the form of older pages that can be linked to (perhaps in an archive of old pages).

5. PAID SEARCH CAMPAIGNS: Finally, you can start a paid search marketing campaign, including Pay Per Click advertising. When you go to Google and start a search, the first two listings in the pink or blue box are paid links, as well as all the links in the far right list. (These are called “Sponsored Links” in Google.)

Search engine marketing is very much a managed process; it is important that your search campaigns are monitored regularly, whether they are paid campaigns or just search optimization efforts. Then, you adjust the words on your site and/or in your paid campaigns to try to improve. We would be happy to send you some costs for paid, managed campaigns if you like.

I suggest working on steps 1-4 right away, especially focusing on putting key search terms on your page and getting more sites to link back to yours.

This article is submitted by Goozmo. Goozmo is a website development company in Boulder, CO. We provide everything from web development, web design, logos to email marketing, e-commerce, shopping cart features. We specialize in an easy to use content management system that lets you update and manage your website easily.

If you want more information or feel like upgrading/implementing search engine optimization packages in your website, contact Kathy Robey at 303-938-6821 or Kathy@goozmo.com!