Local Marketing Guide

When a web user types a query into their favorite search engine, whether it’s Google, Yahoo or some other engine, they expect website listings that are the most relevant to what they’re looking for to appear at the top, and listings that are less relevant to appear further down. On the search engine side, their effort is to use an algorithm to rank each and every public website’s relevance to search queries on demand, and output it to the user’s browser. Search engines move an enormous amount of traffic on the web. Each month, people in the United States perform over 5 billion queries in search engines, and each one of those queries is driven by an intent. These are not people blindly surfing television channels. They’re actively looking for something. That is the value of search engine marketing. You’re putting your listing only in front of people who are actively seeking content that hopefully matches yours.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the exercise of getting a high ranking for your website listing in the search engines for certain keyword phrases that are chosen for the purpose of appearing prominently so that people click on it. Here is what a search engine results page (SERP) looks like, with the ranked listings (called organic listings) on the left.

A recent study conducted by Jupiter Research and sponsored by iProspect showed that 62% of search engine users click on a listing on the first page of the results page and 90% click on a listing on the first three pages. This shows the value of being ranked high for your desired keyword phrases. Keep in mind that the ranking is specific to the keyword phrases and that you will always be optimizing your site so that you get high rankings for certain keyword phrases, and your site ranking will differ depending on which keyword phrase is being queried.

The best website design shops will make sure that their websites are SEO friendly. To be as efficient as possible, one should be thinking about SEO concurrently with the website build and it is a good idea to have someone knowledgeable about SEO involved in guiding the website build. If fail to do this, as many people do, you may have to do a lot of rewriting and re-coding later on and retrofit your site to be search engine optimized. There will be a later chapter on this topic as well.

To me, the easiest way to comprehend the 30,000 foot view of the SEO process is by breaking it down to four major steps:

• Landscape and competitive research - Here, you will take a look at how your niche looks like in the search engines, if people are searching and if so, how much search volume there is and who your competitors are if any.
• Keyword research - Keyword research is what will help you determine what keyword phrases are important to your website, and of those, which ones you should pursue to get high rankings for.
• On-page optimization - These are things that you can do to your website to optimize it for the keyword phrases you have chosen. This process includes adding keyword phrases to pages on your site, properly utilizing the 'title' tags and links within your site.
• Off-page optimization - This consists of building links that point to your website pages.

I will go into how you should do these in the following sub-chapters.

(updated 8/18/06)