Now that you've built a good site, you're finally one of those businesses that have Internet presence. You've opened up another avenue via which you can sell. Happy, right? But, here's a twist to the tale. You soon realize that the website isn't attracting much traffic. You start spending sleepless night over this - pondering what to do now.

Well, don't fret. The solution lies in spreading the word and the ability to attract potential customer to discover the website. Today, a large number of people search for products and business on various search engines. SEO is the technique of structuring a website, so that it's found and indexed by search engines easily. This makes your site more visible to your potential customers.

SEM, on the other hand, is the practice of buying paid listing on search engines. But web marketing is incomplete without doing SEO properly.

SEO is a vastly discussed topic and many books have been printed on it. Not to burden you with yet another tutorial, this article will mostly focus on tips of SEO and SEM.

Doing SEO and SEM for Your Website

Research Keywords

Keywords are what people type in to find information on the search engines. Most keyword vary between 2-5 words, search engines look up for these keywords and return pages that are most relevant and have higher page rank. Hence, it's very important to get the right keywords on every page.

Don't overcrowd with too many keywords, as it's very hard to optimize a page with 20 keywords. There are many different ways to find keywords for the pages on your website. Some good keyword ideas are:

* Words people would search for to find your product or business
* Keyword tags on competitors website
* Visible page copy on competitor's website
* Related search suggestions on top search engines
* Keyword groupings via tools such as "Google Sets"
* Keyword suggestion tools

Following are some of the tools, which can help you find which keywords get searched and how frequently they get searched for.

1. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. http://www.wordtracker.com/
3. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
4. http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

Page Title

This is one of the most important elements on the page. A good page title alone can land a page atop search results. Your title should comprise keywords and each page should have its own title. Using the tools above and content of the page, generate some relevant terms that can be used as your page title.

More often than not a good page title can double or triple the chances of person clicking and visiting your website.

Links:

When linking between two pages or any other document of your website use the word that list well for in the anchor text. Use href="some.htm" title="descriptive text">Anchor text
inside anchor tags over href="some.htm" >Click here inside anchor tags.

It's better to use text links than image. But if you've to use an image, ensure that you place a descriptive image alt tag on it.

Links to External Sites:

It's advisable to link out to quality-related resources or websites throughout the copy of your website. Many search engines rank pages based not only on the copy and inbound links, but also on the pages they link to. Try to disperse outbound links throughout the copy of your page.

Effective Navigation

This not only helps your customer easily find resources on your website, but also helps search engines to better rank your web pages. A good navigation gives you exceptionally keyword rich internal links.

Optimize Your Page Copy

It must be noted that each page is important and has its rank for the search engines; generally a home page has more value since most link would refer to it.

Hence, the home page should be modified for most competitive keyword phrases for your market. Creating the page copy is one of the most important tasks that you could do in SEO. The mantra is to be creative. Try using keywords where they make sense. It's a good idea to use keywords in headings, but be cautious and don't make the copy illegible.

Though most search engines will crawl your site if you do the aforesaid, the best way to get your site indexed is through having search engines follow links from other site. You can also pay for the inclusion, which will be discussed a little later.

Some ways to get links from other sites are:

* List it in a directory. There are many paid as well as free directories available on the Internet. DMOZ, Yahoo directory, sulekha.com, etc., are some of the directories
* Exchange links with similar sites
* Get articles published or write blog about your business. You can even hire professional firms to write blogs about your products and business
* Writing press releases can give you inbound links
* Participate in forums that can give you signature links

Paid Inclusion

This is the practice of paying a search engine or a directory to add sites to its database, rather than setting it up so that it's found by the search engine crawlers. Most search engines support both ways whereas a few support only paid listings.

There are 3 models search engines support: the oldest Cost Per Thousand Impression (CPM) (M is the Roman numeral for thousand), the most used Cost Per Click (CPC) and the Cost Per Action (CPA), which is still in its infancy.

CPM was mostly promoted by big portals. Advertisers did most of the creative work and paid website owners. The portals displayed the ad till advertiser's budget gets exhausted. CPM model didn't have any guarantee of performance for the advertisers, had poor conversion, and no way to measure.

But, it's still popular among many Indian websites.

CPC also known as Pay-per-Click (PPC) distributed the risk to both parties - advertisers and publishers. Publishers have to ensure that the ads are placed on appropriate sites with proper context, increasing the chance of click. Advertisers have to ensure that the ads are relevant for increased conversion.

Google and Yahoo are the two major networks that support CPC and provide good tools to easily create, update, and manage your ads. Google is also a publisher and displays paid ads on its search engine result page apart from displaying them on other publisher on its network.

One problem with CPC is that it can be subjected to click fraud. Hence, it's possible to build a bot or a network of people to click on ads with no interest in the product or services being sold. But, the search engines have done a good job of combating this fraud by blocking such activities.

CPA is the safest bet for the advertisers. Unless the click results in an action (registration or conversion) you don't have to pay the publisher. The risk completely shifts to the publishers where they've to ensure that the ad is displayed in appropriate places, thereby increasing the chances of clicks.

Though paid inclusion requires investing money upfront, it allows you to test real time with the fastest feedback loop of any marketing medium in the world. You would have to compare your customer acquisition cost with the customer life time value to see if it's worth investing in SEM.

Measuring the Performance

Reading through the article you might be wondering, "How do I get to know how much am I getting for the money I spend?" Well, the answer lies in using an analysis tool, which will let you know different aspects of your traffic and effectiveness of you advertising expense.

A typical analysis tool will let you know hits, visits, unique visitors, page views, entry and exit pages, referrers, keywords, click paths, conversion, visitor's demographics, and much more. An effective analysis tool will give you a fair idea where you should focus your money and thus get most from it.

Some of the most common analytic tools are: awstats, Google Analytics, webTrends, and clickTracks. It's good to start with the free Google analytics and if you run into limitations, then upgrade to more powerful paid tools. For most Google analytics would be more than sufficient.

To sum up, SEO and SEM do help improve the bottom line and help you get found. But after people have found you, the onus lies in you to convert those opportunities to sales. It's up to you, quality of your product, services you offer, and how you develop your business and reputation that'll decide your success.

The story doesn't ends here. Gupta, in next section, will discuss on how affiliation and alliances can further expand your business. So, stay tuned in for Part 3.


Related Links:
How to Take Your Biz Online and Beyond: Part 1