Transcript Marketing communications - Vancouver Island University

Search engine marketing
MARK 430
After today’s class you will be
able to:
 Distinguish between search engine
optimization and search engine advertising
 Understand some of the organic methods of
SEO
 Be able to explain methods of “paid
placement”, and pay-per-click contextual
advertising used in search engines
Search Engines and marketing
 Search engines are a narrowcast medium
 Marketing targets those who are already
interested in your product or service
 ROMI is high
 Low cost relative to traditional media
 Good results in terms of traffic, sales, and
branding
Search engines – an effective marketing
channel
Statistics on how consumers search for products online
(from Overture.com)
Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing is the umbrella concept


OBJECTIVE IS TO BE IN THE TOP FEW SEARCH
RESULTS
2 major methods of achieving this positioning within
search engine marketing
1. Search engine optimization (SEO) - built
into the design of web pages (organic
positioning)
2. Search engine advertising and paid
placement
Paid listings
Organic
listings
1. Search engine optimization
(for organic listings)
 Optimizing the web page CODE for search
engine spiders
 Objective: top position in search engine
listings (without paying the search engine)
Keywords / Key terms
 Search engine indexing – how it works
 Relevancy ranking algorithms

“Keywords” or “key terms” are the search terms people type into
search engines
 Find out what search terms your target audience uses in search
engines from your log file analysis
 Try out keywords from generators eg. Overture’s or Google’s
 Look at current search trends Yahoo Buzz, Google Zeitgeist
 Real-time search from MetaCrawler
Search engine optimization
 Focuses on:
 designing web pages that are friendly to search
engine spiders
 making sure that the elements that are indexed by
search engines are all optimal
 called organic methods
 getting indexed and listed by the major search
engines
Designing web pages that are friendly to
search engine spiders
 Search engines love simple web site design
 lots of text (optimized for keywords)
 spiders don’t have to sift through code to find keywords
 Web design elements that impede search engine
indexing





Frames
Flash
Graphics, Image maps and multimedia files
JavaScript (can trap spiders)
Dynamic web pages
Optimizing page elements in html
code






Page body text: content / page copy
Title tag
Heading tags
Graphics: alt tags
Hypertext links
Meta tags
Page body text: content / page copy
 Search engines love high quality, relevant content
 create content your target audience is genuinely interested
in
 Search engines reward sites that have valuable information
 Page copy - make sure your keywords are well
represented
 Higher in the page the better (definitely in the first 25 words)
 Use your customer’s language: not all marketing copy uses
the words that your customers use
 Relationship of a keyword phrase to the total number
of words on a page = keyword density
 Keyword density is a good indication of relevancy
 But remember balance: higher is not always better (boring
for users and penalized as spam!)
Title tag
 Probably the most important page element tag
 Should always contain your most important keywords
or key terms
 Each page of your site should have a different title
tag
 Example of a good TITLE tag that will generate traffic
from people searching for “da Vinci”:
 <TITLE>Leonardo da Vinci</TITLE> (absolute relevance)
 This example is less relevant (but contains other
useful info – remember to balance marketing needs)
 <TITLE>Artefacts: Leonardo da Vinci</TITLE>
 This one will put you out of business:
 <TITLE>Welcome to Artefacts.com: Your Number One
Online Resource for Wall Art Solutions!!!</TITLE>
Heading tags
 <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc
 Used to indicate importance: ie. page or
paragraph headings
 Should therefore be a good indicator of
content - these should indicate the theme of
the page or section
 Use your keywords in heading tags
 Use heading tags when coding rather than
just making the text bigger using font size
Graphics: alt tags
 Spiders can’t see or read graphics
 Make sure all graphics have relevant and descriptive
ALT tags (not photo34643)
 Use your keywords – especially in places like the alt
tags for your logo
 Especially important for navigation graphics (you
don’t want a spider to get stuck on a page)
Hypertext links to other parts of
your site
 use your keywords in hypertext links
 Never use “click here”! – does that look like
relevant or interesting content to a spider?
 make it easy for spiders to follow links
 Include text links for navigation in addition
to javascript jump or hierarchical menus
Meta tags (description and keyword
tags)
 No longer useful as sole tactic to influence rankings
 keywords used in meta tags should match those in
the visible body text
 BUT search engines often use title and description in
the listings themselves
 See next slide for an example of a MUC listing on Google
Title tag
Meta
description
tag
Link popularity
 Strongly influences relevance ranking (for Google,
the most important factor)
 Number and quality of other sites that link to yours
(inbound links)
 must be content relevant (don’t spam!)
 request links from relevant high-ranking sites
 get a listing in a directory
 Find out who links to you
 link:www.mala.ca
 Choose a relevant landing page
 remember individual pages are competing - not your entire
site
Getting indexed and listed
 It is free to submit pages to most search engines
 However, some engines charge a fee in return for a
guarantee of indexing - called paid inclusion
 This DOES NOT INFLUENCE POSITION
 Google and AskJeeves do not follow this practice
 Examples of submission to:
 Google
 Yahoo directory (Express paid inclusion to directory)
Search engine optimization:
summing up
 Decide which search engines to target, and
read all the information for submission and
ranking eg. Google for webmasters
 Select your keywords – use the language of
your target audience
 Don’t attempt to SPAM
 No guarantees – search engines change the
rules constantly
 Remember balance
2. Search engine advertising and
paid placement
 Paying the search engines to get the results
you want
Monetizing search (a little history)
 Several years ago getting a top placing based solely
on optimization techniques (natural or organic
methods)
 Now “paid placement” - practiced by all major search
engines (it provides the major revenue stream)
 Now search engines allow marketers to buy specific
key word positions - ie. buy their way to the top
 Priced on a Pay Per Click basis
Search engine advertising
 Web site design or coding has NO impact on
position
 Position is purchased as part of an
advertising campaign - guarantees instant
visibility
 The website owner has control over:




Position in search results
Keyword choice
Ad listing copy
Landing page
Buying keywords: search engine
advertising
 Keyword bid advertising works on a cost
per click (CPC) basis
 Advertisers pay only when consumers click on
their link.
 Sponsored links in search results
 The company bidding higher on the keyword is
ranked higher in keyword search results.
 Example: Google Adwords in action
 Contextual advertisements
 Served to partner/affiliate content sites
 Effective form of advertising because your target
market qualifies itself
Major players in PPC search engine
advertising
 Google works with an affiliate network
 Overture (renamed as Yahoo! Search
Marketing Solutions): covers a partner
network of search engines and content sites
What does it cost?
 That depends on the keywords, and the
competition for those keywords
 Overture Bid Tool
Overture
 Paying for your position across a range of
websites
 Overture “Precision Match” search: How it Works at
Overture demo
In the lab following Monday
 Creating a Google Adwords campaign