Everything You Need To Know About SEM/SEO

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is very useful to promote a Website in the WWW and to have a better or higher search engine ranking. In another words, SEM is how people find a web site. The following is a list of reasons to implement a search engine marketing campaign:

• 85% of all traffic on the internet is referred to by search engines
• 90 % of all users do not look past the first 30 results or even past the first page (first ten results).
• Cost effective advertising
• Clear and measurable ROI | Relevant traffic + good conversion rate = Sales

Search Engines
Search engines were introduced during mid-90’s as an internet tool used to record links that were important to user of the WWW. Search engines are a large web based (data) and their main goal is to provide better results for users of the internet. The main search engine now-a-days are:

• Google
• Bing
• YouTube

How does search engine work? Spider, a program that automatically fetches web pages, crawls the web to find new web documents (web pages, PDF documents, and videos) typically by following hyperlinks from web sites already in their database. In Addition, search engines index the content on these documents by adding it to their database. Search engines periodically update these contents to later search their own database (not a real time search) when users enter a Keyword to find a related document. Search engines rank the resulting documents using an algorithm by assigning various weights and raking factors.

SEO Algorithm

SEO Algorithm is a mathematical equation that decides which page show up at the top of the search engine page results. This equation is constantly changed, tweaked, and updated by engine search’s engineers. Algorithm varies by search engines; some give more weight to on page factors some to link popularity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a process to maximize web page visibility in Search Engine for users search queries (Keyword or Key phrase). SEO tells Search Engine what the site WebPages are about and helps with easy WebPage crawl through effective Page Title, Meta tags, Alt attribute, Anchor text, Search friendly HTML tags and code, Optimizing quality content, Keyword optimization and link building strategies. Facts:

• 86% of clicks on Google are from organic search, 14% from
paid search.
• Delivers qualified leads
– Fundamentally different than traditional marketing / advertising
– Searchers are looking for you
– More & more offline sales carry an online element

Natural vs. Paid


Meta Tags

Meta tags are placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications. Most meta-tags are included within the ‘header’ code of a website using Meta tags in the title, description and keyword tags is very important. Rules used by different search engines govern how such tags are used, how many characters they should contain, and how they should be formatted. Search engines like Google no longer look at the Keywords and other Meta tag.

Meta Title

Meta Title or page title should be used for on every webpage. Generally the formula should be: website name – keyword | keyword | keyword. Avoid using articles and conjunctions like a, the, and. Use the pipe (|) or dash (-) to separate Keywords this is the primary way to optimize title. This is the primary way to optimize title of your website.


Meta Description

The Meta description tag belongs inside the section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not important. The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:

Meta Name="Description" content="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here."

The purpose of the Meta description tag is to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained within it, as well as to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Image Alt Tags

Image Alt Tags are used to write the text for the images since images is not readable by search engines. While using Image Alt tags make sure you use your targeted keyword since this will help improve Search engine ranking. Many suggest that the Image Alt Tag Text on your images should contain your keywords. Be careful. Some search engines see that as spamming. If you like to do it, don’t overdo it. Better if you use the words, images or picture along the combination of your keywords. The whole process is also called image optimization.

If you use image navigation links it is advisable to place descriptive text links at the bottom of the page to help search engines figure out the relevancy of your pages.
Alt tags are good coding for several reasons:

1. Alt tags let visitors know an image is being formatted before it is displayed. Like the text visitors read as they wait, they can anticipate the image before it appears.

2. Picture alt tags aid visitors who can’t see the image whether they are Lynx users–a text based browser on Unix or Linux systems that has no image capability, or users who have images turned off in their browser preferences, or visitors who are visually impaired. Aids for the blind include readers that can tell them the image’s text description and allow them to understand accompanying information about your images. One warning: if our example above had the alt text, “pic1a.gif”, it would be meaningless for our visually impaired visitors. No description of the image provides no benefit about the image itself!

Anchor Text

Search engine have come to understand that the anchor text or hyper text link often more indicative of a page’s content than the Meta data of the page itself. So much so, in fact, that some pages are ranked in the top ten for highly competitive keywords simply because many other pages link to that page using the keyword as the anchor text of the link. Google is especially susceptible to anchor text (hyper text Link). In fact, it is well known that you can pretty much any given page ranked for a keyword simply by using that keyword as the anchor text (hyper text link) of your links to that page. It is called “Google bombing” and a well known instance of it involved a couple dozen bloggers linking to the official George W. Bush page using the anchor text “miserable failure”. After a couple weeks, low and behold, the page was ranked #1 for the search “miserable failure”, even though those words did not appear anywhere on the page itself. Once you understand the weight accorded to Html text link, you may choose to take a second look at how you hyper link text to your own pages. For instance, instead of linking to a page using the anchor text “Specs”, why not link using your keywords in the anchor text: “Widget Specs”.

Keyword Optimization

Keyword Optimization is always recommended that before going to build the contents of your website, and before going to optimize the each webpage, you must have a complete list of keywords and key phrases (The word or words that relate to a particular topic. Keywords or phrases are used to construct a search statement to find information).

Divide keywords into two following categories:
• Primary Keywords
Keyword for which your mail website should be indexed and rank well in all major search engines.

• Secondary keywords
All the keywords which are used on your different pages along with some matching words which may use differently with respect to geographically or in different terminology.

How to find GOOD Keywords?
• Conduct a survey with your friends and net surfers if you are not sure about how people will search for products you are going to offer from your website.
• Make a list of keywords optimization from the keyword Meta tags of your competitors.
• Make a list of your product and services you will offer from your website
• Prepare general name and specific terms if these things have some botanical, chemical or technical naming in professional use. (If applicable)

Use the following tools:
• Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
• Google Keyword Sandbox
• Word Tracker
• The Best Free Keyword Research Tool
• Good Keywords

Where to place your Keywords
• Place keywords in the paragraphs.
• Place keywords in the heading tags.
• Place keywords in image alt tags.
• When the word is part of a small statement making a specific point, you may bold it or italicize it.
• You may also want to include your keywords a few times in bulleted lists.
• When possible place the optimized keywords in links, and don’t forget navigation.

The key focus of the page should be on readability. If it does not make sense to human eyes then it is no good for a search engine and it will not convert. You want to use keywords and key phrases often, but not to the point where it sounds like you are writing for the search engine and not the user. If you are in question to yourself then you probably are overly optimized.

How to Utilize Keywords and Keyword Density
Any web developer or web article writer needs to have a firm grasp of exactly what keywords are and what keyword density is, in order to get good search engine and directory placement. Many people understand that quality content is important, but what good is quality content if no one can find it? That’s what keywords do for you; help your readers find your content.

Keywords help your readers or site viewers find your site or content. What you need to do, in order to get page hits for whatever you want your viewers to read, is figure out exactly what phrases or words your readers might use in order to search for the type of information you have. But more importantly, you don’t want to use popular words that everyone would be using in their articles, because then you are competing with all the other articles and sites out there writing about the same thing.

Let me explain. If you are writing an article about cooking, using the keyword ‘cooking’ would not really get you high rankings in search engines, because 1) it’s a common word, and 2) every other article about cooking and every other site about cooking will be using that keyword too.
So let’s look at what your content is really about. Perhaps you are writing an article about cooking with jalapeno peppers – well, there’s one of your potential search phrases right there. Chances are, that would be your title, or at least part of your title, of the article or the webpage you are building pertaining to ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers.’

Now, that is a keyword phrase, and each one of those words, with the exception of the word ‘with,’ will also be individual keywords. Let’s look at the Google Search Engine results page for ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers.’ Right CLICK HERE and open this link in a new page, in order to open the search results page so you can follow along.

The first thing you should note is that the word ‘with’ will not be searched for unless it is found in the exact phrase ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers.’ In the search results, you will see the keywords from your search either highlighted or bolded, so you can see the relevancy of the listing. The reason for this is because, outside of the keyword phrase, ‘with’ is not an index-able word.

Other words that are typically not index-able are: a, at, in, on, of, for, and (with exceptions), or (with exceptions), the (with exceptions), is (with exceptions), but, not (with exceptions), and a few others not listed here, including sometimes obscure acronyms and oftentimes, numbers when written numerically and not longhand. Now, the exceptions above are sometimes included in searches, but not usually as keywords. For example, when performing a Boolean Search, and-or-but-not all have a meaning.

Okay, so back to our example: cooking with jalapeno peppers.

As you can see from the search page I provided, and I can’t point them out to you by item listing, because search indexes can indeed change daily, but what you should be able to see is that the highlighted or bolded words from your search string ‘cooking with jalapeno peppers’ are most likely going to be the individual index-able words: cooking, jalapeno, peppers.

But, besides having the keyword phrase: cooking with jalapeno peppers – and the individual keywords, you also have another common search string phrase: jalapeno peppers.
So your Google Search for the example phrase will result in several ‘hits’ for websites with a high concentration of any of the following:

• “Cooking with jalapeno peppers”
• Cooking, jalapeno, peppers
• Cooking, “jalapeno peppers”, jalapeno, peppers

And you might also get returns for the word ‘pepper’ and not just ‘peppers’.

So what does all this mean to you when writing your article?

Okay, to make your article receive good placement for its topic, you want to not only use index-able and searchable keywords and phrases in your article title (and your page’s title if you are building a webpage), but you also want to use these words frequently within the body of your text, to get proper search engine optimization (SEO).

There is some debate about how many keywords should be used in an article or on web content in order to get good SEO. Some will argue that the more the better, but here recently, Google and other indexers, search engines, and directories consider it ‘keyword stuffing’ if your keyword percentage is too high. How high is too high is a gamble, because no one seems to know for sure.

Robots scan your site, not human beings, and these robots really can’t tell if your content is quality or just a page of random words. Therefore, an algorithm is used to determine the ‘quality’ of your content versus your keywords. What these robots do is scan your text (they can’t scan images and most other things), and they count how many index-able words appear on your page. After these robots have the number of index-able words on your page, they count the words or phrases that are used most often on the page.

Once they have these figures, they determine a percentage of keyword saturation. That is, what is the percentage of times that keyword or keyword phrase is used in comparison to the total number of index-able words.

For example, out of 1000 index-able words, if your keyword phrase appears 50 times, then you have a keyword SEO percentage for that keyword density of 5%. Most search engines seem to like keyword density between 2-8%, many web publishers hire freelance writers for keyword density of 10-15%, and most experts agree that if you go over that, you will probably be decreased in ranking due to keyword stuffing.

Now, the important thing to remember here is that this works on any repeated word or phrase, even if you did not intend to use it as a keyword or keyword phrase. I’ll give you an example. For this article, the word: ‘keyword’ and the phrase ‘keyword phrase’ are probably the two keywords I would have picked for this article. After completing the article and running it through a keyword density analyzer, I discovered that my keyword density for these two phrases is:

• Keyword = 3.12%
• Keyword phrase = 1.02% (a little low)
• Keyword density = 1.55%

Which is right on target, but what I also discovered is that there are other keywords that were picked up in this article that I wouldn’t have picked. For example, in the beginning, I wrote a lot about cooking and jalapeno peppers. Now, imagine that someone was searching for cooking and jalapeno peppers and came to this article and found it was about keyword density.

I did this on purpose to prove a point. What I should have done with this article was used an example that had similar content and information as to what my article was about: keywords and keyword phrases. Instead, I wrote an article using the example of “cooking with jalapeno peppers” and in return, here’s the keyword density analyzer tool for the following:

• Jalapeno peppers = 2.18%
• Cooking with jalapeno peppers = 2.32%
• Cooking = 1.09%

As you can see, my example phrases did almost as well on the keyword density as the phrases I was hoping would index for this article. Of course, there’s another issue called ‘prominence’ where my keyword phrases and keywords I have chosen have a higher prominence than the phrases of my example, but that’s for another article.

Now the reason I did it this way was to make a point. When writing content articles, like the ones you will find on Associated Content, you need to be sure that you are writing to your target audience and that the keywords you choose relate to the content you are writing, but more than that, make sure you are not accidentally indexing keywords in your article that have nothing to do with the topic of your article – like cooking with jalapeno peppers has nothing to do with keyword density.

When you do this, readers come to your site, read your article, and are disappointed that it does not contain the information they thought they would find. In the future, if the reader sees our articles consistently don’t index properly for their topics, they may stop reading you altogether.

Content Optimization

Content Optimization is a very important factor in search engine ranking. The technique is to write it yourself and if that is not possible get someone to write it for you. The website with the best unique content get more marks from Google. There are many factors during which should not be overlooked while building. Some of them are explained below:

Keyword Placement: Keyword placement mean where you place your keyword during. The best rule is to have your primary keywords in first two lines of your paragraph.

Keyword Density: Key word density means the number of time the keywords are repeated in your content. This density is generally not more than 5% for the main keyword you are focusing.

Keyword prominence: Keywords prominence mean have your primary keywords standout with respect to the rest of the text. This can be achieved during creation by bolding the text or using italic. What the most webmaster recommend is to bold the text.
Remember content creation during site optimization should be done with most care since in search engine world CONTENT IS THE KING. The website with the best text gets the best search engine ranking.

Internal Links

Internal links is a link in the context of web design is a hypertext function whereby clicking on the word or picture (an “object”) causes a web browser to load the new page to which the object is linked. Thus, clicking on the hypertext-affected word card should lead you to a page about a card or cards. Most commonly, a link to a page outside the same domain is considered external link, whereas one in the same domain name is considered internal link. However, these definitions become a bit tricky when the same organization operates multiple domains functioning as a single web experience, e.g. when a secure commerce website is used for purchasing things displayed on a non-secure website.
Similarly, a blogging website might have thousands of different blogs, in which context one might view a link as “internal link” only if it linked within the same blog, not to other blogs within the same domain. Search engine spiders prefer the simplicity of the hypertext link to any other form of linking structure elements. In fact, the anchor text is deemed very important in the eyes of the search engines and is assigned more weight within the search engine algorithms then ordinary body text.


Link Weight

Link building is another consideration of internal linking in conserving or distributing link weight. Most websites have the majority of inbound links or backlinks directed at their index page.

Follow this simple formula:

“The more important the page, the more occurrences of links to that page within the site. The less important the page, the less frequent the number of links.”

Site Map

A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors, and search engine robots, to find pages on the site. An example is the one on EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation’s) page.

Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

Site maps do have limitations. Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, additional strategies besides the site map may be required that search engines, and visitors, can access all content on the site.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO is getting found on the search engines without paying the search engines for the placement (Pay-per-Click), and keep getting found for a long, long time. The following is a list all most relevant benefits of organic optimization:

The search results are long-lasting
Organic SEO keeps a website appearing on the search result pages for a long time because that website gives the search engines exactly what they want — relevancy. Relevancy is something you cannot achieve by “tricks” or by paying for it. You can only be relevant by being relevant, and that means, constantly generating content that people want to find and consume. As long as you ensure relevant content, other websites link to you, and the search engines love your website for that.

Organic SEO builds greater trust
If you are constantly adding organic (read natural) content to a website, it shows you really care for what you present on the site that shows you take interest in the business and that further shows you are really there to do business and have not just created a website on a whim. Organic content also manifests your deep-rooted knowledge of what you are involved in.