Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a very fast growing area of Internet Marketing. SMM takes advantage of broad user-based websites such as Myspace, Facebook, and other sites where communites gather and share information or generate content. CertifiedMarketers understands the need to reach your audience in as many places as possible and generate the most buzz you can about your product and/or service.
Niche Marketing
Niche Marketing is the process of identifying potentially profitable market segments and designing specific items or services for such a market. CertifiedMarketers has insight and experience in assisting clients maximize their marketing dollars by helping them explore untapped areas and providing them with a marketing roadmap to succeed.
Online Marketing Campaign
Perhaps you've heard the term mentioned in a meeting, on a forum, or while researching an online marketing campaign for yourself. Maybe you're unsure about what SEO is, or better yet, why SEO is important to you at all? Maybe you understand the concept of SEO, but don't whether it's better to learn SEO yourself or hire a professional SEO to market your website. This article aims to clarify the reasons that SEO is important to your business, and whether or not you should take on the task of learning SEO or outsourcing it to an SEO company.
Search marketing basics
When a searcher goes to Google and types in a word or phrase, sees your website listed, and clicks though, you have attracted a visitor from a search engine. In order to maximize the number of visitors coming to your site, you have to take specific actions to rank higher in search engines, entice searchers to click your link and convert more visitors to paying customers. That's what search marketing is.
Search engine optimization vs. search engine marketing
Before I get ahead of myself, I need to clarify something. SEO and SEM, though closely related disciplines, are still separated by one thing - the type of search results you are focusing on. The two types of search engine results are organic results and paid results.
Organic search results - Also known as natural results, organic traffic is what SEO aims to accomplish. Organic results are what the search engines believe to be the most relevant web pages for any given search. When people talk about search engine optimization, they are talking about how to get your website at the top of Google, or other popular search engines.
Paid search results - This term refers to both paid placement and paid inclusion. Paid placement allows a site to pay to have its page listed in the top results for a given keyword or key phrase, regardless of whether or not your page is about what the searcher entered. Paid inclusion guarantees your website will be indexed (catalogued) by the search engine, so that your pages may appear in the organic results when someone enters a matching keyword or phrase.
The major difference between SEO and SEM is that search engine marketing encompasses everything you do to raise your site's visibility in the search engines. This includes both SEO for organic results, plus deals with building a successful paid search campaign for your site. Therefore, since this article is focused on what makes SEO important, I'll be focused on search engine optimization only for the remainder of this article.
How to use SEO to improve your business
So just how many people use search engines regularly? Search engine statistics from 2004 say that 64% of Internet users utilize search as their primary method of finding things. You can just imagine the millions of people today using search to find hotels, travel deals, electronics, clothing, and the list goes on-and-on. If your site is not fully optimized for search engines, those searchers will find your competitors instead of you. This is what makes SEO so amazingly important to your company.
Learning SEO vs. hiring an SEO
Hiring an SEO is an expensive thing. If you're trying to start a website as a hobby or as an entrepreneur on a shoestring budget, I would suggest learning SEO yourself. It takes an enormous amount of time learning and testing SEO strategies, not to mention all the technical aspects of building and running a website. However, in the end, your efforts will pay dividends.
If you have an established small business, or a medium-large sized company, you can't afford to miss the increased exposure SEO can give your business. If your company has a website that is not seeing the conversions or search traffic you want, SEO can help change that.
Some companies make the mistake of dumping the job of launching a SEO campaign on in-house talent such as someone in IT or the company Webmaster. The result is usually that the person is already overwhelmed with their current duties and never gets the project going, or their effort is halfhearted at best. Before you make the mistake of trying to cut corners on your own site's SEO, take advantage of the free 3-hour consultation at CertfiedMarketers.com.