"Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is defined as a form of marketing on the Internet that businesses and organisations seek to gain visibility on SERP's through paid or non-paid means" (Moran and Hunt, 2005 cited at See Journal Here). Therefore, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines, and SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. It considers how search engines work and what people search for, involving editing a website's content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to removed barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. 'Search engine friendly' is a term used to describe website designs, content, images, videos and menus that have been optimised for the purpose of search engine exposure. An example of this is the Daily Mail website. They are an unlikely website to have mastered the marketing
tool of SEO, but with a total of 40, 500,667 unique users the website broke online records in April 2010. This has been puzzled over, as The Daily Mail reaches no where near these figures with sales on the newsstand. Easy access, quality content is the cornerstone for the websites success - housing most popular sections high on the first page for celebrity-obsessed browsers. Down the right-hand column of the page is the latest celebrity gossip in small sections that help the website get picked up by search engines. Keywords chosen especially to optimise the chances of search engines finding the site can be seen within the copy. All the stories on the Mail's website are short and accurately detailed to encourage people to click through.
The SEO Success Pyramid
The model was adapted by Matt McGee (See Article Here) and goes through the process of making great websites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. I feel that it is an interesting way of thinking about Search Engine Optimisation and could be applied to any company who wants to use SEM as a marketing tool.
I think, we as marketing students, have had drummed into us that Word of Mouth is such a powerful marketing tool - this is also true and must be remembered when using this model. As you get further up the pyramid, buzz/word of mouth marketing and community play a huge part in making the process of SEO much faster, the human element being the deciding factor as to whether a company is successful in the search marketing arena.
According to McGee's model, the success of SEO depends on:
Commitment: The team working on the project, whether it is directly the marketing team or an external SEO specialist team must be enthusiastic and engaged.
Planning: Setting goals for the SEO Campaign and developing a set of strategies and statistics is essential just like any other marketing campaign.
Product/Service: The product/service being marketed needs to have potential and quality for the marketing to work.
Education/Information: The search marketing industry changes rapidly so information needs to be up to date and ongoing as this is also just as rapidly changing.
Patience: Search marketing takes time to implement correctly even though it is rapidly changing. This makes the marketing a hard task.
Design & Usability: The website needs to be attractive and easy for the visitor to use without any hard technological ways of entering it.
Keyword Research: This is a hugely important part of SEO - keywords need to be researched carefully and can never be too specific or overused. 'Longtail' keyword phrases may also need to be looked at.
Analytics: Measuring, analysis and adjusting a company's SEM is the only way that it can be deemed if the strategy is effective or could be improved in any way.
Tools: Using SEO tools can give a company an advantage over competition, but more importantly the skills to interpret this data.
Crawlability: A search engine cannot index pages that its spider cannot crawl such as Flash movies, complicated DHTML and javascript.
Content of the Website: Can be blogs, articles, videos or user generated content such as product/service reviews.
Links: Great content needs links to get a better rank on search engines.
Social/Local Findability: Social Media Marketing and Local Search are essential and will be dictated by the size of a company which one you emphasise more. The company want customers to be able to find them as easily as possible.
Reputation Management: This is extremely important at a time when social media is such an effective vehicle and the public have a growing influence over user reviews - these can have a huge impact on how your company is perceived.
Trust: Is at the top of the pyramid, and the Number 1 goal for any company is creating a trusting relationship with its consumers. Trust = Power so when a company achieves trust from users and search engines, according to McGee it is on its way to marketing success.
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