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When looking out for potential Search Marketing service providers, what are the parameters on which a company should be judged?

Each and everyone would have his or her own list of parameters. But the most common ones would be:-

1) Testimonials or the kind of projects the company has undertaken in the past.

2) The experience and qualification of workforce.

3) Whether the company is reliable in terms of quality and timely delivery of the projects.

This is of course true for any industry and not limited to the SEO industry.

But I was wondering why not judge or rank a company by searching for terms like ‘SEO’ or ‘internet marketing’ in Google and look for that company in the search results. And depending upon their rank in listing one can have a fair idea about their capabilities to get higher search ranks (Assuming that the company has SEOd its website for the key terms ‘SEO’ and ‘internet marketing’)

Isn’t it fair? A company which promises you good Search ranking and can get itself in the top page for highly competitive words like ‘SEO’ and ‘internet marketing’ has already proved a point! (Again, assuming no black hat SEO techniques are used). Care should be taken as the focus is only on search engine optimization and not the whole Search engine marketing.

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Recently one of my friends asked me if images could be used by lawyers to help them do better on search engine marketing. At first, it appeared to me an obvious Yes.

We have all read and known the utility of images in content. But if we delve deeper into the question, we realize that it is not that easy to answer. To elucidate the point I am making, let me pose a question.

How many of us search lawyers by images?

I guess none. If that is the case, then how could we use images in better search engine marketing?

I would be more than glad to listen to and learn new ways of utilizing images for better search engine marketing.

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It’s rightly said that one of the biggest factors which ensures that any marketing campaign is a success is a good product to be marketed! A Marketer will consider his job half done if he has a quality product to market.

So before you start planning to chalk out your budget for marketing for your online venture, make sure you have a strong blueprint to get a successful product on hand.

Treat your online presence as if it’s a place in the real world. Then think how you would go about planning and preparing if you had to get a home or a shop built in the physical world. Believe me, the basic checklist remains the same, be it your home sweet home on the Earth or your website on www!

1) Once you have decided whether you need a Bungalow, a penthouse or a Flat the first thing you start looking for is a good location. (I will leave ‘what you need part to you. You are the best judge for what you need!). Similarly once you have decided what niche you want to be in or what business you want to start on the web, you will need to search for a good location, i.e. a good and reliable Hosting Service provider. Make a list of what service you would need, how many email accounts, how much web traffic you expect, etc. Then compare some of the service providers and select a good plan. Don’t fret to invest marginally more for good quality. It’s not everyday that you buy hosting service. And you won’t want to change it every now and then.

2) After finalizing the locality and land, you get down to the blueprint, the map or the drawing of the building (whatever you may call it), the actual layout. You may take help of an architect if you want a detailed drawing.
Similarly, once you have your hosting space done and you are ready for the work on putting into shape your website idea, get an outline of the website done. Take care of factors like the number of pages you want, how are you going to handle the navigation, basically the site map. Leave the beauty part out here. Colors, theme and the visual appeal will appear later.

3) After the architect gets your building blueprint ready, the actual brick and mortar work starts. On the website front that’s the actual coding. One thing to note here: If you are a business person or a non techie, leave the implementation details to your developer. Let him decide what’s best for you : PHP, ASP, joomla or drupal. You don’t tell the construction guy how thick the steel rods should be or what grade cement should be used. He knows it best.

4) Now that your home has a shape and you know how it’s coming up, you start taking care of the finishing, the interiors. What color goes best, should it be white, peach, you know that best. It’s your walls, your taste. Same goes with the website. Keeping some basic principles in mind choose your pages color, the font, the sidebars, the top bars’ colors. What banner goes best with your service or product, your tag line etc.

5) When its all done, its time for celebration, time to invite people, your near and dear ones, your colleagues to your place for housewarming or for just showing off ! This is the ‘internet marketing’ part. But before you do that you should make sure that things at your home are in place, its appealing to the visitors. This translates to the basic on- page SEO to please the Google bots! Ideally this part should be taken care of during the coding phase.

Spend time and efforts on building your product and take my word: You would enjoy the marketing part.

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How to find the right keywords for your web presence?

One would say why another post on something which has been beaten around so much. By this time, everyone knows everything about keywords for websites or blogs and they don’t need another article/ post on the same.

But recently I met with one of my friends who was in the process of optimizing his web presence. During the conversation, he mentioned about the process of keyword mining for his business. After listening to him, I thought to myself

“Is it really the way how it should be done?”

The process involved usage of one of the free tools available to find out root word for his business and a tail related with that. In this context, the stem/ root word was human resource. And woila!! That was it. The search for the right keywords ended there.

This whole process of keyword mining forced me to pen down my thoughts about how it should be done.

First businesses should not look at their web presence as mere websites. Problem creeps up when the management doesn’t show much enthusiasm and interest in building a powerful web presence and treat it as just another marketing activity. Web presence (or web sites for small businesses) is their signature; it is like a visiting card which would tempt people to come to you and buy something from you; it is your identity to the world. And if it is your identity to the world, then care as well as quality time should be devoted in developing it.

Another important thing to be kept in the mind is that YOU are the best SEO consultant for your web presence. No one else could help you more than you yourself. It is you who know inside out about your business and not somebody else who has technical aptitude. Therefore invest time with your SEO consultant or company for finding out the right keywords for your web presence.

The process of finding out the right keywords starts from putting yourself into the shoes of your customers and ask these basic yet important questions:-

What do your customers look for when they come to you?
What are those words which are repeated in your marketing and advertising materials?
What is your differentiation strategy in the industry?
What is your USP?
What sort of questions do your customers (both external as well as internal) ask you?
What would you say if you were to ask what business are you in?

Only after you have answers to these simple yet important questions, any SEO company or consultant can help you. After this step, it doesn’t matter what tool he uses or whether it is paid or free.

 To sum up, no one else can really help you in identification of the right keywords other than YOU. SEO companies will merely execute the things but ultimately it is YOU who holds the key for your web presence’s better search engine visibility and drive up the sales since at the end of day it is the hike in revenue which matters to YOU.

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Before any marketing campaign, it is necessary to understand the landscape first and then devise a strategy according to that.

If that comes across as a common sense, then why don’t we do the same for search engine marketing? I wonder how many self proclaimed SEO companies actually understand the science behind search engines. SEO, acronym for search engine marketing, is not only about Meta tags, keyword targeting or keyword density. True search engine marketers need to understand the anatomy of various kinds of search engines and the search process.

Most SERPs (search engine result pages) present information from various sources like

1) Crawler based search engines

2) Search engine advertising

3) Human edited search engines, also known as web directories

4) Speciality or topical engines also known as vertical search engines

While most SERPs present hybrid information with data collected from more than one source. But search engines are classified according to the main source used. For example, Google is crawler based search engine. Yahoo directory or Dmoz falls in web directory category.

Now delving more into the crawler based search engines, it consists of 3 main components

1) Spiders: Responsible for finding and fetching web pages; a process known as crawling or spidering. Spiders also built a list of words and phrases found on each web page.

2) Indexer: Creates a database of words and phrases and then places web pages into the database.

3) Query Processor: It allows user to run searches for keywords on that database and fetches the most appropriate results from it.

I am sure this simple knowledge about search engines and the search process will go a long way in launching an effective search engine marketing campaign.

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