Search Engine Marketing Advice ~ The Top 4 ways to generate more traffic for your website

This trend has sprouted the growth of the search engine marketing industry.

The term search engine marketing encompasses strategies such as search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising campaigns, paid inclusion and direct feeds to search engines.

Let’s look a little more closely at what these activities mean and how they can help you attract new customers to your site.

Search Engine Optimisation

There are numerous companies that now offer SEO services.

The process normally involves several components including researching the keywords that people use in search engines that describe your products and services; incorporating those special keywords into the visible and hidden parts of your web page; generating links from other web sites and monitoring the performance to see if your pages obtain top search engine rankings for your desired keywords.

Why is it used?
With millions of pages now on the internet, it is increasingly difficult to achieve high search engine rankings for the keywords relevant to your business.

Many companies are now taking special action to try to achieve better search engine ranking by adopting SEO techniques. Without using such techniques, some businesses find it difficult to attract sufficient numbers of qualified leads to their web site.

Should you use it?
SEO can achieve top search engine placements. If qualified visitors are obtained through top search engine placement it can result in significant increases in online sales and leads. Though, it is important to measure the results and your return on investment to determine whether the benefits from the increased traffic outweigh the SEO investment. JAZreturns marketing conversion tracker can show you which SEO terms are producing your sales. Find out more about JAZreturns marketing conversion tracker here.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click advertising campaigns

What is it?
PPC advertising allows you to pay for top search engine rankings.

Specifically developed PPC search engines use an auction system that allows you to bid for search words. These engines reward the highest bidders with the highest positions in the search results. You then pay the bid price each time a person clicks on the search link to your web site. Minimum bids for most engines range between 1 to 20 cents per click.

PPC ads are distributed to other search engines and are normally referenced as sponsored results. For example, if you visit the Google search engine you will see the organic search engine results on the left, and the paid PPC ads on the right under the heading ‘sponsored links’.

Why is it used?
Many businesses use PPC advertising to quickly generate traffic to their web sites.

Should you use it?
PPC can give you exposure to thousands of people who are looking for your product at the exact time they are looking for it.

Initially, you will need to test the market to see what works and what doesn’t work.

The key is ensuring that PPC advertising is cost effective for your business.

You should then calculate your PPC advertising return on investment and determine how much money you are willing to spend to acquire a new customer in order to decide whether you should continue with PPC advertising.

To do this you need to know how many sales your PPC campaigns generate. It is essential that you use a PPC ad tracker to do this. JAZreturns marketing conversion tracker has a built in PPC analysis feature. Find out more about JAZreturns marketing conversion tracker here.

Paid inclusion

What is it?
It is possible to submit a new web page to many search engines for free. Though free inclusion in most search engines is not guaranteed and the lead time to get listed can be up to 6 months.

Paid inclusion services ensure that your web pages are quickly indexed by some of the major search engines.

These paid inclusion services are offered by internet marketing companies, whereby you pay a fee to the internet marketing company and they will have your web pages included in search engines such as AltaVista, HotBot, Inktomi and Lycos.

Some of the paid inclusion programs guarantee that your URL will be added to certain search engines within 48 hours and then the URL is refreshed every 48 hours for a 12 month period.

It is important to note that the paid inclusion services normally charge a fee per web page, rather than per web site.

Why is it used?
Some businesses cannot afford to wait 6 months for their new web site to be listed in the search engines.

For existing web sites, if you regularly update your site content, the paid inclusion allows your web pages to be refreshed regularly thereby ensuring that the latest information on your site is indexed by the engines.

Should you use it?
If you have a new web site or want to ensure that your content is continually refreshed in the engines, you should consider using paid inclusion for the important pages on your web site.

When deciding whether to renew or continue with paid inclusion, you need to measure the results of your paid inclusion pages. To do that you can use JAZreturns marketing conversion tracker, which will show you exactly how many sales were generated from the paid inclusion pages. Find out more about JAZreturns marketing conversion tracker here.

Direct feeds

What is it?
Many web sites are updated on a daily or weekly basis with new product listings and new content. Direct feeds, normally XML feeds, are a method used to send the information on your web site directly to particular search engines.

XML feeds are commonly used for news and shopping comparison engines.

Why is it used?
XML feeds offer a consistent cost effective means of ensuring that your latest web information is included in engines.

Should you use it? If you offer products, regular news bulletins or other regularly updated information, an XML feed may be of benefit to you.

If you choose any of these search engine marketing strategies, it is best to test first, then measure. To be able to test your results accurately you can use a marketing conversion tracker program.

Once you have tested and measured your results, you can then put together a well rounded search engine marketing strategy that will help you to increase your sales and generate qualified leads.

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Sharon Wild
Strategy & Marketing Director of e-JAZ, Sharon has been involved in the e-commerce community for several years. She successfully manages Australia's largest online jewellery store, Gillett's Jewellers.

Sharon can be contacted via email on sharon@e-jaz.com.au