1. Search Engine Marketing for Micro Enterprises Thomas Poulios Teaching Assistant Dpt. of Project Management TEI of Larissa (University of Applied Sciences)

2. What is “Search Engine Marketing”? Search engine marketing (SEM) is defined as "the act of marketing a Web site via search engines, whether it be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search related activities“.

3. The Rise of Search

4. What is a search engine? (1) Def: An internet-based tool that searches an index of documents for a particular term, phrase or text specified by the user. Commonly used to refer to large web-based search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet. Different than a Directory Common Characteristics: Spider, Indexer, Database, Algorithm Find matching documents and display them according to relevance Frequent updates to documents searched and ranking algorithm Strive to produce “better”, more relevant results than competitors

5. What is a search engine? (2)

6. Why is Search Important? Highest ROI Entry Point to all things Measurable Optimizable Deal Closer

7. Why Search Engine? 85% of all traffic on the internet is referred from a search engine 90% of all users don’t look past the first 30 results (most only view top 10) Many websites aren’t even indexed, most are poorly optimized and get very little traffic from the search engines Cost-effective advertising Clear and measurable ROI Operates under this assumption: More (relevant) traffic + Good Conv. Rate = More Sales/Leads

8. Search market share 1999 Northern Light23,86% Infoseek11,36% HotBot11,93% Snap!11,36% AltaVista12,50% MSN10,80% Google!5,68% Excite5,68% Lycos3,98% Yahoo!2,84% February 09EuropeUS Google 87.30 % 68.29 % Yahoo!4.09% 19.95 % MSN3.72%5.89% Ask3.07%4.23%

9. Major Search Engines Google feeds AOL, Netscape, Earthlink & others Yahoo owns Overture, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, FAST & others Google, Yahoo & MSN results account for 80-90% of all search traffic (rough estimate)

10. How Do Search Engines Work? Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically by following hyperlinks from websites already in the database Search engine indexes the content (text, code) in these documents by adding it to their huge databases and periodically updates this content Search engine searches its own database when user enters in a search to find related documents (not searching web pages in real-time) Search engine ranks resulting documents using an algorithm (mathematical formula) that assigns various weights to various ranking factors

11. What is the difference between organic and paid listings?

12. The Golden Triangle Eye Tools Research Pay Per Click $$$ Organic = Free

13. Golden Triangle Statistics 85% click on “natural” (unpaid) results 72% of searchers click on the first link of interest 25.5% read all listings first, then decide Position 7-10 in natural listings = top 4 PPC slots on the right hand side of the page

14. Ranking Factors 4.9 Keyword Use in Title Tag 4.4 Global Link Popularity of Site – “Weight” or “Authority” 4.4 Anchor Text of Inbound Link 4.1 Age of Site 4.0 Link Popularity within Internal Site Structure 3.7 Keyword Use in Body Text 3.5 Links to Quality/Relevant External Sites 3.4 Age of Document 3.3 Keyword Use in H1 3.2 Age of Link 3.1 Text Surrounding the Link 2.8 Keyword Use in H2, H3 etc… 2.8 Keyword Use in Page URL 2.6 Keyword Use in ALT Tags 2.4 Frequency of Page Updates 2.0 Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag 1.4 HTML Validation 1.2 Keyword Use in Meta Keywords Tag

15. Search Engine Indexing Limits Page File Size No more than 150 kilobytes Before Images, CSS and other Attachments Links Per Page No more than 100 unique links per page Title Tag No more than 70 characters Meta Description No more than 155 characters

17. Parameters in URL: No more than 2 Depth of URL: No more than 4 Bad Example http://www.mysite.com/people/places/things/noun/danny/car Best Practice http://www.mysite.com/people/danny/

18. Avoid Image Text Iframes for displaying content Flash, Silverlight or video for content without text equivalents AJAX – Avoid navigation that relies on javascript onClick="navigate('ajax.html#)

19. Keywords Determine the value of keywords/phrases to increase traffic to a page or site. Use keywords in the navigation that visitors use to find your site.  Easier for visitors to navigate the site  Improved rankings, search engines better understand how your site is related to searches.

20. Keyphrase Research Tools Assists with keyword/phrase brainstorming Show how often search terms are used Quantifies the effectiveness of keywords/phrases Less competition for a keyword/phrase mean that it will be easier to reach the top of SERPs.

21. Keyword/phrase Tools Google AdWords is the best free keyphrase tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal WordTracker The industry standard, a subscription is required – also has a free tool Overture Database Search No longer consistently available Microsoft AdCenter Not for Mac/Safari Other Keyword Search Tools Trellian – Keyword Discovery Spyfu Nichebot Hitwise Trends Yahoo suggestion on search

23. PageRank One of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. Each web page - not site - has a PageRank score Developed by the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page It’s an algorithm which helps rank web pages based on the probability that a random person surfing the Internet will find a given page. PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Votes cast by "important" pages weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

24. Links are Key Link Popularity / Authority Links = “Votes” Links from many pages signify an important page Links from important pages carry more ‘weight’ Important pages rank higher Link Reputation Links from related pages enforce the theme Links from related words pass on that theme Strongly themed pages rank well for related queries

25. Links - Best Practices Bad http://mysite.com http://www.mysite.com/index.html http://mysite.com/index.html Good http://www.mysite.com/ Use redirects and make all internal links point to your domain using the “http://www.mysite.com/” Always include trailing “/” on folders.

26. Avoid “click here” SEO: Link nouns not verbs View the course catalog.

27. How can I create a Google-friendly site? Google Webmaster Help Center http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/an swer.py?answer=40349 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/an swer.py?answer=40349 Google on SEO http://www.google.com/support/webmasters /bin/answer.py?answer=35291

28. Basic Tips & Optimization Techniques Research keywords related to your business Identify competitors, utilize benchmarking techniques and identify level of competition Utilize descriptive title tags for each page Ensure that your text is HTML text and not image text Use text links when possible Use appropriate keywords in your content and internal hyperlinks (don’t overdo!) Obtain inbound links from related websites Monitor your search engine rankings and more importantly your website traffic statistics and sales/leads produced Educate yourself about search engine marketing or consult a search engine optimization firm or SEO expertsearch engine optimization firmSEO expert

29. What is Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing? Gives business owners the ability to nominate what particular search phrases they would like their advertising to appear on. Who are the MAJOR PLAYERS in PPC advertising?

30. PPC Related Terms CPC – Cost-per-click The cost to advertisers per click by a user. CTR – Click through rate The number of users who clicked on an ad divided by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). Usually seen as a percentage. Definitions

31. PPC Growing in Cost Growing in Competition Bidding Techniques (Start a campaign at the end of the day or the end of the month) Organic clicked 5x more than PPC

32. PPC vs. “Organic” SEO Pay-Per-Click“Organic” SEO results in 1-2 days easier for a novice or one without much knowledge of SEO ability to turn on and off at any moment generally more costly per visitor and per conversion fewer impressions and exposure easy to compete in highly competitive market space (but it will cost you) can generate exposure on related sites (AdSense) ability to target “local” markets better for short-term and high-margin campaigns results take 2 weeks to 4 months requires ongoing learning and experience to reap results very difficult to control flow of traffic generally more cost-effective, doesn’t penalize for more traffic SERPs are more popular than sponsored ads very difficult to compete in highly competitive market space can generate exposure on related websites and directories more difficult to target local markets better for long-term and lower margin campaigns

33. Social Media Optimization “Linkbait” Potential for organic traffic and quality backlinks

34. Resources: On the Web SEOmoz.org Especially see SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide SearchEngineWatch.com http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/ Google Webmaster Tools http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349 SEOBook.com http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/