nternet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the internet, including design, development, advertising and sales.  The largest method of marketing online is search engine marketing (SEM).  When it comes to SEM, there is a lot to be excited about.  For one, it is the fastest growing segment of the marketing industry.  

Why search engine marketing?

Well, to give you an idea, search engine marketing (SEM) is growing at a faster rate than TV, than radio, than print media combined.  It's no wonder, considering it's the cheapest and best form of advertising available.  In 2005 the American search engine marketing industry grew to 5.75 billion.  Now, the industry easily exceeds 10 billion and will hit 20 billion before 2011.  These aren't small figures.

Here at The Old State, we say it all the time.  What's the point of having a great looking web site if no one can find it?   The best designed web sites will fail if no one finds them.  

Your web site is the single largest marketing tool available.  It's working for you around the clock, 24/7, all over the world

Your web sites worth is only derived from the people who surf it.  If no one is surfing it, then it becomes useless.  

Once your web site is up and running, search engine marketing (SEM) is the single largest contributor to your success. SEM is growing at a larger rate than all other forms of traditional marketing combined.  With SEM being the largest contributor to marketing efforts, why aren't more businesses taking advantage of it?  Search engine marketing is on fire.  It remains to be the single most cost effective way for businesses to attract new customers.  

Whether you are looking to sell your products online or even just generate some press about your services, your web site must be found by the search engines.  And not just any search engines - the top search engines.  In 2007 Google had the strongest hold of the market capturing more than 75% of the market share.  Yahoo had a strong hold on the search engine market with more than 12% of the marketing share, followed by MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves.  While other search engines such as AltaVista, AllTheWeb, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape, and Teoma hold less than 1%.

Forms of search engine marketing

There are two main forms of search engine marketing.  Organic and PPC (pay-per-click).  Statistically, more users click on organic ratings than any other.  These are the search results which are found in the natural listings placement area (non-advertising) when you perform a search on all major search engines.  

Organic SEM is the cheapest and best form of advertising available on the planet, period

 

In SEM, statistically, more users click on organic rankings than any other.  Organic ratings account for over 70% of clicks of the search engine market with the other 30% being PPC advertising.

Unlike PPC, in achieving top organic rankings, there can be a high level of sophistication involved.  PPC is just what it says it is.  You pay each time someone clicks on your ad, and your PPC advertisement is shown in advertising space.  The level of complexity in utilizing organic SEM campaigns is much higher than PPC.  PPC, you can almost pay to be listed at the top.  This is not the case with organic ratings.

In choosing which company to broadcast your SEM campaign, it is important to see that companies live SEO portfolio.  This portfolio should display a live list of optimized keywords and phrases which highlight rankings the company is receiving for optimized search terms.  This portfolio is live so you can easily search the internet and see the portfolio's results.  The Old State has achieved over 1000 number one rankings on a wide variety of search terms for client sites.

To give you an idea on some of our strategies, one of the best ways to get search engines to visit and index every page of your web site is by delivering unique indexable content on every page.  This process is automated by using our content management system, Governor.  Governor creates unique indexable content through the form of title indexing, URL rewriting and indexing, image alt tag indexing, meta tag indexing, content indexing, etc.  On top of this, we develop our web sites utilizing content positioning techniques.  This ensures the most important content of your pages are at the top of the page code, making the content easily indexable by search engine spiders.  We support SEO semantic coding by completely separating the content and presentation information of the site.  Only the content information is viewed by the search engine spiders and not the detailed presentational data (graphics, positioning, etc).

The most important part of organic search engine marketing, the sooner your site gets high ranking search results, the better.  The earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site and the higher it will rank.  So usually the sooner you get to the top, the more likely you will stay there as more people are clicking on your links.

In the next post, I will talk a little about Multi-Channel Marketing.  Specifically, if you are only selling your products on a web store, you are missing millions of potential customers...