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Internet Marketing - Markmedia Articles |
Internet Marketing – Search Engine Basics
Internet
Marketing has recently been a hot topic for many website
visitors, so we decided to look at ways to boost your web
sales. These are the main marketing methods that we use at
Markmedia, and ones that we implement them for our internet
clients.
SEO is done in
two complimentary stages:
On page
optimisation – ensuring the engine can read what your page is
about
Off page
optimisation – linking to other sites to show you are a valued
part of the web community.
Why is this
important to search engines? They use a program to scan your
site and to see what it is about. Of course, the program
cannot read like a human so it needs to look for clues. Go
back to the top of this article and see how I have written the
title and the introduction to tell search engines that this
article is about internet marketing (In fact I have
been a little heavy handed to illustrate the point). Internet
Marketing is the first phrase in the title and it is in bold
print. This is and important signal for search engines. In the
title and the first paragraph there are 60 words and internet
and marketing appear 6 times. This gives me keyword density of
(6/60 * 100) = 10%. I am manipulating these two factors to
make sure that search engines understand that this page will
be interesting to people looking for information on Internet
Marketing. On page optimisation is about using expert
knowledge about how search engines read web pages and
manipulating the text so that is readable by both humans and
web crawling software. This is a very complex topic and is one
where factors regularly change as search engine programs
evolve, so it is best to seek the advice of an expert.
Off page
optimisation consists of building links to sites to show how
the site is an active and valued part of the web network. If a
site has good unique content, other sites with related content
will be happy to link to it. Sometimes these links will be
reciprocal (you link to me and I will link to you), but the
most valuable links are one way. These backlinks show that
your content is valuable, relevant and has some authority with
web users and other webmasters. Good one-way links from sites
that the search engines rate highly are fast becoming one of
the most important factors that search engines use in
formulating their rankings.
The next two
articles in our series will look at the specific tasks you
must carry out to rank well on Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
This article was written by Mark McCormack from Markmedia, a
B2B marketing consultancy. Mark has over 20 years experience
in all aspects of marketing. His website is
www.markmedia.org.uk. This article is copyright and all
rights are reserved.
 Our Marketing
library is freely available to visitors to our site.
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For a free initial discussion in confidence, phone +44 (0)1780
758506 or email iinterested@markmedia.org.uk.
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