The Value Of Seo Within Sem-00-4279

By Author: 4Ps--Marketing
Total Articles: 4393
Comment this article

1.1 Introduction

SEM can be broken down into two areas of expertise, pay per click (PPC) and Search engine optimisation (SEO), the latter of which this article will focus on introducing.

In the interest of giving a complete overview of SEM however, it may be wise to at least talk briefly about what PPC involves. PPC is a way of targeting audiences online through paid for advertisements on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. It involves bidding on certain keywords which users type in on search engines to get your advert ranking as high as possible in the list on the right hand side and top of the results page. The aim is that when a user does type in the word ‘pottery', your advertisement for a pottery class website will rank on the first results page and hopefully attract some attention and therefore some clicks. This is the reason it is called pay per click, as the advertiser pays the search engine a fee every time someone clicks on their advert.

That is a basic introduction to what PPC is, and the rest of the article will now be focussing firstly on what search engine optimisation ...
... is, and secondly what its value is within SEM.

2.1 SEO

Search engine optimisation is another entirely separate route you can go down in order to fulfil your website's potential. It can be a much lengthier process, and if not done with an expert eye, can simply be a stab in the dark. However if applied correctly, it can be a really powerful tool in fulfilling a website's potential. So how does SEO work? SEO is the way in which you can get your website ranking higher on the actual search engine results page, so that hopefully when a certain keyword is typed in, for example ‘mens clothes', your online fashion website will appear first on the list.

There are several aspects to SEO, including onsite and offsite optimisation, link building through PR and articles, and the importance of social networking sites.

3.1 Onsite and Offsite Optimisation

The first key aspects of SEO are onsite and offsite optimisation. Onsite optimisation firstly involves editing the website's content and images to include the keywords which are specified in the HTML code and in particular the Meta data. For content this is obviously just a case of editing the text that is currently in place, but for images the solution is not as obvious. In this instance, it is a case of creating Alt text which can be placed behind the image, and which will appear when hovering over it.

In terms of editing the Meta data found in the code of a webpage, there are three aspects to make sure every page has optimised. The least important of these is the keywords section, which Google says it does not use, however it is still important to optimise them as other search engines are still believed to look at them. The description and title sections of the Meta data however are very important to give a search engine such as Google the chance to crawl your website for relevancy to the keyword being searched for.

Offsite optimisation on the other hand involves building links to your website from other relevant websites. This is crucial to the success of SEO, as each link back to your website counts as a vote of popularity in the eyes of Google. There are literally thousands of ways to build links, however using a marketing led approach with PR and articles can be a very effective way of creating links back to your website. PR involves creating company related blog posts for example, whereas generating articles which can be sent out to lots of other industry related websites to get published is also a good way to build links back to your website.
Finally seeing the potential of social media is another way in which SEO can be successful. A social media is a website such as Twitter, Facebook or Digg, which allows millions of people online to communicate and share interests. With this also comes the opportunity to share links, and so it's a great way to raise brand awareness, and keep people updated on sales, events and other important news.

4.1 The Value of SEO

Having described what SEO is and how it can be achieved, what is its value within SEM? It is essentially a more cost effective and longer term solution than other aspects of SEM, but it vitally requires expert implementation to be successful.

About the Author:

4Ps Marketing are a london based SEM agency offering core SEM services including http://www.4psmarketing.com/ and PPC Management. The http://www.4psmarketing.com/ uses only sustainable and ethical techniques throughout all of their campaigns.