Top 10 Tips for Search Engine Marketing

SEM 1: When submitting information to search engines, pay particular notice to ensuring that the correct information is used and the entry accurate. This is particularly important for submissions to web directories, as Noreen Cleary of Elemental Creative reminds us that these are edited by a ‘real editor and not a piece of software will edit the directory’.

SEM 2: Don’t set out with the intention to ‘trick’ Search Engines. This may have been easy to do in the early days, but the engines are becoming more evolved and besides being unceremoniously thrown out of the engine, you may be blacklisted by that engine.

SEM 3: Use only stratagems, optimising measures such as tags, keywords and copy that pertain to your product, service or are in all ways directly related and relevant to your chosen market. Keep it simple and focused.

SEM 4: Honesty is the best policy. Be clear and honest about what you are undertaking and how you conduct SEM, and put processes in place to ensure honesty prevails. As Jackie Danicki of searchlatitude.com informs us that such honesty is key to success and not only confined to the company’s own activities, but where other organisations are involved. An example of such is ‘click fraud’ where their Loss Prevention Officer collects more than £25,000 per month in click fraud refunds from the search engines on behalf of their clients.

SEM 5: Jackie Danicki also reminds us that SEM is not wholly a stand alone activity. It is all too easy to ignore that it must be seen in context with all the other marketing activities we undertake. Likewise, her colleague COO Richard Gregory at searchlatitude.com suggests that those objectives must also be in line with the main return on investment calculations for any campaigns and Charlotte McDougall at Spannerworks stresses the need for clarity in setting objectives from the start. Edward Cowell of Neutralize.com asks us to take a ‘balanced approach to using all the tools and techniques at your disposal, pay per click, optimisation, SEO PR & relationship management’.

SEM 6: Know your Market, Know your Engine: Richard Gregory also emphasises that each search engine has its own SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) – and this must be fully understood as part of your alignment strategy. Another colleague SEO Manager Andrew Redfern suggests perhaps, that we should treat engines more like we would an important human customer – making sure that it is informed, with the correct information, and kept up to date. Titles, content and format should be in line with what a human being would expect to find!

SEM 7: ‘Remember the Landing’ – although we may have considered the web site prior to SEM, set up our SEO components and aligned with other marketing activities, let us not forget the path through which the visitor will come and what we want them to do when they get there. Charlotte McDougall asks us to ‘always consider the users' overall experience and needs when designing your campaign - remember to provide them with the information they are searching for.

SEM 8: remember also, that although this is SEM, and relatively new, this is still marketing. The marketing mix considerations apply here as much as anywhere. Trends, patterns, dynamics may be different to the offline world, but the strategies behind dealing with variations and on/off line considerations are bound together well if we apply the same rigour and sense that we have in the past to more conventional marketing activity.

SEM 9: Webtrends, the pioneer in online tracking and measurement, warns us against not using our collected data appropriately – the data we collect and collate on our customer’s web-based and other activities – so that we learn to use it effectively in turn to inform our SEM strategy. David Searle of Webtrends underlines the importance of this and states that ‘SEM is becoming a major area of interest and investment for companies and never before have we been able to measure and profile our end users as we can today’. It is effectively a two-way street.

SEM 10: Know the Science: most of us will confess to knowing something of SEM, but little about the ‘nuts and bolts’. This is such a new activity, and if it is to be performed comprehensively lets put our hand up in the air and ask for help. Check out the companies below and the further hints and tips to make sure that your SEM is both effective and profitable.