Facio recently wrote an article on the basics of Search Marketing for inprint, the official magazine of the British Print Industries Federation
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is the process of promoting your website by increasing its visibility to potential customers in search engine results pages (serps). Statistically, in the UK 60% of all off-line purchases are now preceded by an online search through a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! So whether or not your business has an e-commerce website (where people can buy from you online), online searching is now an important part of the buying process for a customer, and important for your company if you want to increase sales. It can be achieved in two ways. Either organically (through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the preferred long term strategy), or through PayPerClick campaigns (generally a shorter term, higher cost strategy based on a bidding system)
High organic listings (those which aren't sponsored (PPC) results) are a sort after commodity as statistics are now showing that only 32% of search engine users click through to page 2 of the search engine results pages. So being in the top ten search results for your chosen keywords/phrases can be highly profitable.
Search Engine Optimisation is becoming more and more complicated as the search engine algorithm's try and produce the best results for their clients, the searchers. SEO can be split into 2 sections, on-site and off-site. On-site, your search rankings can be affected by how your site is coded, how regularly your site is updated, or if your HTML tags are being utilised properly. Above all else, you site requires quality content that the searcher will find useful for the words and phrases they have searched for. Often the site owner is oblivious to these points and won't understand why only one of their website pages is indexed in Google and why they're not getting any visitors to the site. Off-site SEO consists mainly of inbound link building (this can be thought of as a vote for your site), article writing and social media bookmarking, but its not just a case of the number of inbound links you have; it's the quality and structure of the link that counts.
Using the wrong techniques to achieve high rankings can have a detrimental effect on your site over time. It's even possible to get your whole site banned from Google if the above SEO strategies aren't implemented in the correct, ethical way.
High organic placement can take time (3-6 months) and a lot of persistent effort. Once you're on page one of Google or Yahoo! you can't afford to neglect your SEO strategy otherwise your site will slip back down the rankings and again become less visible to potential customers.
If you've got any questions about Search Marketing or PPC, please feel free to contact us