Search engine marketing reporting and optimization

Search engine marketing reporting

The first website promotion tactic you should use is search engines.

Research proves that mostly everyone begins their online search at a search engine website, such as google.com, msn.com, or yahoo.com. That is why search engine marketing reporting and optimization is so critical for your website.

You can pick up some free website traffic by submitting to search engines as well as special topic directories.

Search engines: build your site then submit

Submitting to search engines and directories is an easy task. I recommend you build 20 – 30 pages before you submit your website to a search engine or directory. If you have quality, focused content, the search engines and directories are more likely to accept your website to be listed.

Search engines are programmed to look for good quality content, so aim to deliver by first focusing on providing valuable, relevant information to your visitors instead of ads and affiliate links. The monetization comes only after you start building regular daily traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization

SEO or Search Engine Optimization simply refers to the art/science of optimizing your website pages for a higher ranking at the search engines. If you have a budget for this, you could choose to hire an SEO company or consultant to optimize your website pages for you.

But it’s more practical to do it yourself.

If you are on a shoestring budget, I would definitely recommend that you try it yourself first. By making just a few adjustments on your website pages, you can dramatically increase your search engine rankings and chances for being listed.

You MUST be listed in the top 20 or the first page of the search engine results, or you might as well not exist. Most people do not look past the first 20 listed websites.

To help you on your own way, see my search engine marketing reporting optimization tips below:

Search Engine Optimization Tips

· Choose one keyword (or keyword phrase) for each website page. Title your website page with this keyword, include a title heading with the keyword, and repeat the keyword throughout your content page a few times where appropriate.

Caveat: More is not better – if you overdo the repeated keywords, you can be seen as trying to manipulate the search engine robots and be banned. So just write naturally for your human visitors and don’t overdo it for the robots.

· Choose specific keywords you can “win” more easily.

For example, choose “downtown new york walking tours” over “travel”. Big companies like Expedia have the budget to own “travel”, so go for the more specific, winnable keywords and keep your content relevant to the keyword or keyword phrase.

· Launch a link exchange program. The goal is to get other related websites to list your website on their website.

The more quality “incoming links” or websites you can get to do this, the more popular you are with the search engines.

· Play fair - do not try to cheat the search engines. Do not try seedy tactics to try to “trick” the search engine robots to giving you a higher ranking.

The search engines run thousands of sophisticated programs to find you and they will blacklist you! Don’t do it! Instead, build your website with integrity and write content relevant to your topic for your visitors (not for the search engines) and you will be rewarded.

· Do not obsess over your search engine marketing reporting optimization – focus on your quality content.

SEO’ers who spend all their time tweaking their pages to the 100th decimal are wasting their time. Why? The search engine robots change their algorithms constantly, so once perfect, it’ll change anyway.

We cannot be #1 at all the keywords, so be thrilled with several top 20 rankings, and focus your time on building quality pages.

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