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SEM: Promoting Your Online Business

Of all the strategies you use to promote your business online, the most important by far is search engine marketing.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a term that encompasses both paying for a prominent position in search engines and directories, as well as going through a process called search engine optimization to ensure that your site becomes visible through natural or "organic" means.

The process of paying for good positioning was once equated with SEM, but it's a broader term now. Your SEM strategy can be limited to paying for placement, earning placement by optimizing your sites and having them recognized by the search engines or a combination of both.

Paying for Your Position
Your "position" with directories and search engines is a measure of how close to the top of the list your site ends up when consumers use search terms to locate information. The goal, of course, is to be at the top of the list.

Since a high position on search results is valuable real estate, it's a great money maker for search engines. Big names like eBay, Overstock.com and Home Depot often pop up at the top on searches for household goods, for example.

Prices can be high for these valuable spots. One way that vendors price your position is called PPC or "pay-per-click" (or CPC, "cost-per-click"). They charge a penny or more (or perhaps even a fraction of a penny) for each user who clicks on your ad or your entry on the search results list.

Clearly, a click on a link to your site (called a "click-through") doesn't guarantee a sale, but it's a start in getting potential customers to notice you.

So it might cost only $100 to send 10,000 visitors to your site, but what counts is the "conversion rate," the percentage of click-throughs that turn into actual purchases.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is both complex and mysterious.

It's complex because it involves research, the possible re-engineering of your web site, considerable knowledge and experience and the ability to keep up to date with policy changes by the major search engines with which you're listed or want to be listed.

It's mysterious precisely because those policies change from week to week. Many online business owners are frustrated because they can't seem to obtain a clear set of rules for optimizing their web sites. The search engines have a good reason for keeping their rules a secret.

First, the goal of search engines is to index every web page in the universe and then do a good job in meeting the needs of their customers. They want to return results that are both relevant to the user and of high quality.

A few years ago, one of the strong indicators of quality was a site that was rich in text. You could probably tell at a glance what a good information site looks like, but machines are doing the work and they only understand rules and algorithms. So text quantity was a strong indicator. It wasn't too long before unscrupulous designers put up sites that had a lot of nonsense text hidden in the background color (invisible to visitors, of course) to try to fool the search engine.

For every rule or algorithm, a cheater came up with a scheme. That's why the rules change so often. The search engines try to refine their rules so that the results really are quality, relevant sites.

The Importance of Keywords
Keywords are simply the words (or phrases) that users type into the search box to get search engine results. Obviously, you'd like your site to pop up high in the list when someone types in a phrase that describes your business or one of your products. Alas, the competition is fierce.

Your search optimization strategy should be to have a site that's optimized on a particular keyword or phrase so that you beat out your competition. Now, if you sell forty different products, you may have 75 to 80 key phrases, so that's a tall order, and very time consuming.

Search engines and directories expect that if you claim a key phrase, that really is what your site (or page) is all about. For example, if you sell lizard food and try to lay claim to the phrase "pet food", you may be rebuffed. That's because people who search for pet food are more often than not looking for cat, dog and bird food. You can, of course, do quite well with the phrase "lizard food." You'll also want to do well on all those things that lizards eat, like crickets and mealworms. You should consider general phrases like "reptile food" too.

The relative frequency of a key phrase on a page can be easily determined by spiders (the search engine's search robot), so it's often used among the search engine rules for ranking your site. Search engines also care whether the target phrase appears among the metatags (your site name, page description, and other HTML tags). Even ALT tags can bear the keyword or phrase you have in mind.

Again, cheaters quickly figured out how to pepper their sites with phrases to attract visitors. However, arriving at a site that prints "lizard food" on the screen 1,000 times isn't exactly a great experience for the user. So keyword frequency or density is never the only parameter for placement.

The more products or services you offer on your web site, the more complex and time-consuming is the task of finding appropriate phrases and placing them strategically in your code and text.

Choosing Keywords
The most effective key phrases are those that are naturally used by consumers as they're searching the internet. This is known as an organic search, where "organic" is equated with "natural."

Just when you think you know exactly how people search for items on the internet, they'll surprise you. You may think "barbecue grills" is a great phrase to sell your backyard grills, but you'll have to consider "bbq grills" and "b-b-q grills," and all the combinations they're likely to use. Worse, you'll find many consumers typing in "barbecue girlls!"

Of course, collecting information on organic keyword searches is a big job, so if you want access to the data, you'll have to pay a monthly subscription fee. It's well worth the cost, however, since you have a stake in attracting the most targeted audience your can.

Working with SEO Experts
SEO professionals have the training, tools and experience needed to do a good job of optimizing web pages. The biggest headache in SEO isn't rewriting text to smoothly incorporate phrases and coming up with descriptions that include the keywords. It's keeping up-to-date on what algorithms the search engines are using to measure the relevance and quality of your site.

SEO experts do a lot of reading, they attend conferences and they participate in online forums. This adds to their overhead, so their services can be expensive. For a beginner in e-commerce, though, the SEO professional is an important member of your marketing team.

Your ROI (return on investment) when paying for positioning or search engine optimization is a factor of several variables:

• the number of key phrases or keywords you plan to promote
• the average sale price of your products
• the number of visitors to your site as a result of the promotion
• the click-through rate
• the conversion of leads to sales.

Say you need more than 100 key phrases to describe products that sell for less than $1, you may be surprised to find that your ROI can be quite low. To get an idea of your expected ROI (which you'll need for your business plan), search online for an ROI calculator that specifically computes ROI for keyword promotions.

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