In my article last month, I introduced you to some of the basics regarding getting your website up to speed and ready to attract potential buyers. This month I would like to concentrate on SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), giving you some practical tips on how you can apply these to your website, in order for you to rank higher in the Search Engines.

Some Search Engine Market Share Numbers

Generally, individuals do most of their searching with Yahoo and the corporate world searches using Google. Further, for February, 2008, Google had a commanding market share of 59-percent of all searches on the web compared to Yahoo's 21-percent. Other major engines made up the rest: Microsoft, AOL, and Ask. (Source: comScore)

Based on these numbers, I have elected to make certain my site ranks well on Google. It's worth noting that when I give seminars on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to photographers, I encourage wedding photographers to set their search marketing on Yahoo! because that is likely the portal that is being used by brides and others looking for a photographer.

The Importance of Good Keyword Phrases

Critical to any successful web marketing program is the intelligent selection of one or two keyword phrases for your business. You'll need to try to determine what search phrase your potential clients might use to locate a photographer or illustrator that would be suitable for their project. As an example, I have optimized my site for "Detroit Photographer" which ranks number one on Google, and "Annual Report Photographer" which ranks number six on Google. When a new potential client calls to discuss a project, I always ask how they found me, and if they say they found me on the internet, I'll always ask them to share with me what search engine and search term they used. The search phrase you eventually settle on will become your Keyword Phrase.

Keywording Tools

There are several good keywording tools available to help you determine what keyword phrase you may want to optimize your site for. One is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It's a free tool and provides excellent feedback. Most SEO experts agree that the best keywording tool is Wordtracker. It is a paid service, but they do offer a limited, free version at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com. It returns up to 100 related search terms to the keyword phrase you enter along with an estimate of each phrases daily search volume. Either of these tools will help you to determine the best keyword phrase for which to optimize your website.

What is SEO and SEM

SEM refers to Search Engine Marketing, sometimes referred to as "Pay-Per-Click" or PPC. Google refers to their PPC product as AdWords, while Yahoo! calls theirs Yahoo! Search. Under this model your business will appear in the Sponsored Links section of a Search Engine Results Page or SERP. Quite simply, the more money you spend with Yahoo! or Google, the higher you'll rank in the Sponsored Links section of a SERP for the keyword phrases you've selected.

SEO on the other hand refers to Search Engine Optimization, or more specifically, the process of making adjustments to your website to make it rank higher in the SERPs. These results are called "organic results" because you don't pay for this high placement; instead you make constant tweaks to your website's home page to get to and stay at the top of the SERP for your keyword phrase. In other words, it's free, but it takes lots of hard work. But let's back up and examine how your site is examined by both Google and Yahoo! and for that matter, each of the other search engines.

We Want Free!

Of course, your goal is to optimize your site in such a way that it will rank highly (at least on the first page) in the SERPs for your keyword phrase. While you are undergoing this process, you may want to spend some of your marketing budget on either Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search so that you have a search presence immediately. Then, once your site begins to rise in the rankings organically, you can trim your spending on paid search. So let's see what you'll need to do to improve your site's ranking.

Spiders On the Move

The internet is known as the World Wide Web, so it logically follows that the automated "robot" that examines websites is called a spider. Each search engine sends its spider on a thorough "crawl" of the internet indexing websites. It does this by following links on web pages. A spider can only pay your site a visit if your site is linked to by another site or your site's web address (URL) was submitted manually to that particular search engine. This is why only about eight percent of all websites are indexed by search engines; if a spider discovers no link to your site, it doesn't know it exists.

It's All About Relevancy

The search engines work very hard at returning relevant results for each search phrase submitted. They do so by constantly adjusting their complicated algorithms that are used in analyzing the websites in their databases. As you may have guessed, none of the search engines disclose exactly what they look for, but by examining high ranking sites, you can get a feel for what page elements they deem important. There are reportedly more than 100 items that they examine in each website to determine how relevant a site is to the search phrase a user submits.

You'll be making modifications to the HTML (hypertext markup language) code of your site. HTML is simply the computer programming code that instructs a web browser how to display a web page. If you have a pre-designed website such as Livebooks or BigFolio you'll have a control panel of some sort that will allow you to make some of these recommended tweaks to your website. For security reasons, some access to the actual HTML code is usually disabled in their control panels so not all of these changes can be implemented with these products.

However, if you created your site yourself or have access to the source code of your site, all of these changes are quite easily made using website software such as Adobe Dreamweaver.

Next- the Nitty Gritty

For July's Insight, I'll examine a few page elements that search engines examine and ones I feel are crucial to improving your site's ranking. In the meantime, I wish you success in your SEM and SEO endeavours, and hope you have found these tips to be of value. I can assure that I have used these techniques with great success myself, so give it a try! In this competitive marketplace, you should be doing everything you can to get your website noticed by the buyers you are interested in.