Search Engine Marketing: Survival of the Optimized

In order to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of business, industry professionals have to understand their customers. They need to put on many different hats including: PR guru, copywriter, editor, and publisher, to name a few-all of which involve social media. Social media has become the key to running any successful business in this technology-driven world, and it's important to determine the techniques that will keep your company "LinkedIn."

Search Engine Marketing

These techniques are all a part of what is called Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. SEM is one of the most important factors in the survival of any company. The goal of using SEM is to attract new visitors to your company's website using online optimization. This can be a difficult task as the Internet is overloaded with infinite amounts of information that potential customers won't take the time to sort through. The key to attracting the customer is having the knowledge of how to stand out from the 100 plus pages of search results these potential clients are sorting through. Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, and other platforms are the answer to business promotions. People can use their social platforms as a way to tell their friends, fans, and followers what they are doing, where they are, and attribute it to a company's page. SEM can be broken down into two important subcategories: Social Media Optimization and Search Engine Optimization.

Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization is just an updated, newly-charged version of age-old viral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing, while still important and resourceful, isn't as profitable as it once was without the assistance of technology. Using this word-of-mouth concept, businesses are able to advertise their fares and wares without spending a dime. By using this form of in-bound marketing, companies can create instant exposure to their sites. This goes as far as connecting the right social media tool to the right industry with the right targeted consumer. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Stumble Upon, and more play an important role in the presence of a company on the web. Making your company's presence on social platforms will keep potential customers and users aware of new features, promotions, or even the existence of any given company. Users of these platforms are able to follow, tweet, like, or link to the company's page. This in turn provides more data and pull in the search engines results as well as keeping up-to-date on what is newsworthy and meaningful to users on the Web.

Search Engine Optimization

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) correlates. Search Engine Optimization allows for the promotion of a website without overloading the reader with too many results. For example, if someone is looking for software that will incorporate forms into their site, they may type, "online form" into their search engine of choice. In Google, online form comes up with over one million results. There is no way a potential customer will click through and research every company or result the search engine provided. This is where the optimization comes in. The search engine provided the results it did by crawling through the web and collecting any site with the keyword "online form." These results may or may not be what the person was looking for. In order to stand out at the top of the search list, companies need to optimize keywords and content. By creating good content and making it accessible, your company has that much more weight in results on the search engine. Google adWords is helpful in keyword research and targeting the things people are actually searching for on the Web. Tools like the already mentioned adWords are able to assist in keyword research, finding out how many times users are searching for them, expansions of phrases, and putting these words and phrases on companies pages in the right manner. In conclusion, Search Engine Marketing is the key to running a successful business with use of the Web through techniques such as Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization. This grand-daddy marketing technique actively puts your company in direct competition with great competitors in the right markets if done correctly. Happy optimizing!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Krista_Mnichowski

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