Defining the goals of internet marketing - SEM
Before we go fully into the subject of internet marketing, I have to point out that not all professionals agree on its definition. It is a young discipline, and there is still debate about what exactly the term means.
Large organizations such as Forrester Research and the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization believe that SEM is a feedback loop between the technical optimization of a website (SEO) and paid advertising on the internet (Pay Per Click - PPC). That is the definition I follow as well.
How to optimize a website?
Defining the goals of your internet marketing is necessary, but you should pay special attention to the simple things that will make your site optimized for search.
Here is a short list of tricks that search engines will quickly notice on your site:
- Get to know website optimization: the most important component of SEM is that your website can be found easily in the search results.
Your website must have a title, keywords and a description. These three components are exactly what allows a search engine to find your site for the particular keywords a user has typed in.
The website title
The title of the website is also the title of your link in the search engine when it finds your site. The title should be appealing to users and explain in about ten words what they can find on your website. It should contain the name of your agency or company and a short description of your services.
Keywords
For example, if you build websites, your keywords should be: website development, web design, web page development, internet... and so on. To explain a little - you need to guess what a user who is looking for you will type into the search engine.
The website description
The description appears in the search results right under the site title, and in one or two sentences it explains what you do. The trick is to use as many keywords as possible in the description without the text losing its meaning for the user who will read it.
For example, for the keywords above the description would be: Website development at the best prices. Let the Izrada sajtova Srbija agency help you present yourself on the internet and build your web page to the latest standards.
(as you can see, in two sentences we used 4 keywords) - Once we have defined the title, description and keywords, we have to check whether the website is built to HTML standards. There are various websites where you can check the validity of your HTML, some of which are: http://validator.w3.org/, http://www.w3schools.com
note that every error the validator reports should be fixed - The third item is the presence of important tags in the content.
H tags
It is important to have one H1 tag on every page. It should usually contain the name of the page, and the first keyword should be exactly that name. For example, if the page is called website development, the first keyword should also be website development. It is good to work the next 3 keywords into h2 tags somewhere, and if the content is well written, that should be it.
Lists on your website
All lists in the content of your website should be in a UL tag and then in LI tags.
ALT tags
Every image in the content of your site should have a defined alt tag. The alt tag is a description of the image, because search engines cannot recognize what is in a picture, so you have to write what the image actually shows.
A tags
From experience I have learned that search engines "like" every important keyword on your site to have its own page where you explain that keyword - in other words, for there to be some content about it. Give every link a title attribute, because validation requires it. - Linking your website with other sites is still one of the most important items for search engines. Search engines rank your website by how many visits you have and by how many other sites contain a link to it. Let me clarify what I am trying to explain. A search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing...) ranks your site by how long visitors, that is users, stay on it. You will agree that if a user stays on your site longer, your content is useful to that user, and so search engines open the way for you towards the top of the search results. When another website places a link to your site, it means that the whole of that website considers your content credible. The higher the search engine rating of the page that contains the link to your site, the more the rating of your site will rise.
Linking with other websites should be your priority once the technical part of the optimization is finished. Social networks are the best example of this. - Website optimization is worth nothing without statistics and tracking the results of your work. The best tool for website statistics is Google Analytics. It is Google's tool that lets you follow the visits to your site, how effective your keywords are, which pages are visited most, and so on... I consider this tool mandatory for every website.
- The last item of website optimization and internet marketing is not exactly a favorite, but it is more and more unavoidable. It is "pay per click" promotion of your site, or in its original name Pay Per Click Advertising. Because more and more websites deal with the same subject or the same line of business, several sites end up with the same keywords, similar content and so on. If you are new to the online market, it is very hard to compete with a website that has been on the internet for some time and already has some trust from the search engines, which your website needs to "overtake". Paying the search engine directly will help you with that. We covered this in more detail under the topic Pay Per Click Advertising.
This is only the beginning of optimization and internet marketing
These tips will only help you get started and set sail into the world of internet marketing. This field is constantly developing and requires constant study. To end this article, I just want to tell you to publish content that will interest users - that is, to try to think like your target market. The English have a great saying: WALK IN THE CUSTOMER'S SHOES.
