4 Free Search Engine Marketing Tips Every Business Should Use

Search engine marketing may be a new media way of relating to customers, but the basic principles of marketing remain the same. To that end, following are four SEO marketing tips every company should make use of – no matter their size... or the size of their marketing budget.

I. Tracking Your Search Engine Marketing Efforts
Just like old-school marketing, you have to track your campaigns to see if they’re working. Free ranking tools like the Alexa and Google toolbars can help you do this.
Note: Google is by far the largest search engine, referring over 85% of search engine traffic. Hence, you definitely want to track your marketing efforts as it relates to this mighty search engine.

II. SEO Content: A Cornerstone of Every Search Engine Marketing Campaign
Nowadays, it’s not enough to have content on your site, it must be SEO content. This means content with the appropriate keywords used judiciously throughout the text.

SEO Content Marketing Tip: Don’t use keyword-stuffed copy. Not only can it have the opposite effect of ranking your site lower in SE results, it’s bad for your business’s image.

III. Practice Intrasite Linking
This is one thing many firms new to search engine marketing don’t do – mostly because they don’t know how important it is to helping them rank higher in SERPs.

To explain, the goal of any site is to become, at best, an authority in their niche. One of the best ways to do this is to invest in a lot of useful (SEO) content. Ostensibly, when you have a lot of content and you’re in a tightly defined niche, you’re going to have content on one page that is relevant to another page. So, you link to it. This is intrasite linking.

Intrasite linking has three definitive search engine marketing benefits, ie, it:
(i) Builds authority: As discussed just above;

(ii) Leads to more referrals: If your site is really beneficial, visitors are much more likely to refer it to a friend; and

(iii) Converts prospects: If your content is highly useful, web visitors tend to hang around longer. This makes it easier for you to “capture a prospect” and eventually convert them into a paying customer

IV. Add a Site Map
You want to do everything you can to help search engines spider (search) your site so they can categorize the pages and return them in search engine results. This is what a site map does.

Doing these four things will make your foray into search engine marketing much more successful.

By: Internet Marketing Institute

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

PPC Summit puts on interactive workshops that teach you how to utilize the Internet as a marketing tool, including pay per click, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and social media resources. Learn more about search marketing with our newsletter.