Presentation by Jon Payne President, Ephricon Web Marketing

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Search Engine Marketing

• Presentation by Jon Payne
• President, Ephricon Web Marketing
• What is Search Engine Marketing?
• How Do Search Engines Work?
• How Can My Business Get High Rankings?

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Agenda
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What is a Search Engine? (1/2)

• Def An internet-based tool that searches an
  index of documents for a particular term, phrase
  or text specified by the user. Commonly used to
  refer to large web-based search engines that
  search through billions of pages on the
  internet.
• Different than a Directory
• Common Characteristics
• Spider, Indexer, Database, Algorithm
• Find matching documents and display them
  according to relevance
• Frequent updates to documents searched and
  ranking algorithm
• Strive to produce better, more relevant results
  than competitors

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What is a Search Engine? (2/2)
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Why Search Engine Marketing?

• 85 of all traffic on the internet is referred
  from a search engine
• 90 of all users dont look past the first 30
  results (most only view top 10)
• Many websites arent even indexed, most are
  poorly optimized and get very little traffic from
  the search engines
• Cost-effective advertising
• Clear and measurable ROI
• Operates under this assumption
• More (relevant) traffic Good Conv. Rate More
  Sales/Leads

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Major Search Engines (1/2)

• What Search Engines Are the Most Popular?Figures
  below show what percentage of US internet users
  accessed the corresponding sites at least once
  during a given month. Counts only
  search-specific visits. (Nielsen//NetRatings
  June 2004)

• Google 41.6
• Yahoo 31.5
• MSN 27.4
• AOL 13.6
• Ask Jeeves 7.0

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Major Search Engines (2/2)

• Google feeds AOL, Netscape, Earthlink others
• Yahoo owns Overture, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, FAST
  others
• Google, Yahoo MSN results account for 80-90 of
  all search traffic (rough estimate)

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A Search Engines Goals Objectives

• Accumulate large index (database) of web
  documents to search
• Provide highly-relevant results to users (better
  than competitors)
• Generate revenue via paid advertising and related
  business ventures that typically leverage large
  amount of traffic

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Anatomy of a Search Engine
Search box
Sponsored Listingsaka PPC
Organic Resultsaka SERPs
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How Do Search Engines Work?

• Spider crawls the web to find new documents
  (web pages, other documents) typically by
  following hyperlinks from websites already in the
  database
• Search engine indexes the content (text, code) in
  these documents by adding it to their huge
  databases and periodically updates this content
• Search engine searches its own database when user
  enters in a search to find related documents (not
  searching web pages in real-time)
• Search engine ranks resulting documents using an
  algorithm (mathematical formula) that assigns
  various weights to various ranking factors

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Ranking Factors

• On-Page Factors (Code Content)
• Title tags
• Header tags
• ALT image tags
• Content, Content, Content (Body text)
• Hyperlink text
• Keyword frequency density
• Off-Page Factors
• Link Popularity (votes for your site) adds
  credibility
• Anchor text

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What a Search Engine Sees

• View Source (HTML code)
• http//www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html (HTML
  text, no images and little formatting)

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So What is the Algorithm?

• Top Secret! Only select employees of the actual
  search engines know for certain
• Reverse engineering, research and experiments
  gives SEOs (search engine optimization
  professionals) a pretty good idea of major
  factors and approximate weight assignments
• Constantly changing, tweaking, updating is done
  to the algorithm
• Websites and documents being searched are also
  constantly changing
• Varies by Search Engine some give more weight
  to on-page factors, some to link popularity

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Whats an SEO?

• SEO Search Engine Optimization
• Refers to the process of optimizing both the
  on-page and off-page ranking factors in order to
  achieve high search engine rankings for targeted
  search terms.
• Refers to the industry that revolves around
  obtaining high rankings in the search engines for
  desirable keyword search terms as a means of
  increasing the relevant traffic to a given
  website.
• Refers to an individual or company that optimizes
  websites for its clientele.
• Has a number of related meanings, and usually
  refers to an individual/firm that focuses on
  optimizing for organic search engine rankings

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What Does a (good) SEO Do?

• Researches desirable keywords and search phrases
  (WordTracker, Overture, Google AdWords)
• Identifies search phrases to target (should be
  relevant to business/market, obtainable and
  profitable)
• Cleans and optimizes a websites HTML code for
  appropriate keyword density, title tag
  optimization, internal linking structure,
  headings and subheadings, etc.
• Helps in writing copy to appeal to both search
  engines and actual website visitors
• Studies competitors (competing websites) and
  search engines
• Implements a quality link building campaign
• Pushes for more content!
• Monitors rankings for targeted search terms

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What SEO is NOT

• Search Engine Submission only
• Submit your website to 5,000 search engines
• An overnight process (typically takes 3-4 months
  to show significant results)
• A one-time process (in many cases requires a
  continual, long-term focus for best results)
• A 29.95 one-time fee!

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Farms, Black Hats Ethics

• Black Hat SEO refers to various tricks of the
  trade that are often questioned as ethical by
  some SEOs. Typically refers to a tactic intended
  to misrepresent a website by displaying different
  information to the search engine versus the user.
  hidden text, redirects, etc.
• Ethical SEO refers to methods used to improve
  rankings while still presenting the same
  information to both users and search engines.
• Link Farms sites/pages that may have thousands
  of links, often to unrelated sites. Typically
  they provide these links in exchange for links to
  their site in an attempt to improve their
  rankings. Reciprocal linking is common and
  generally accepted when not excessive and an
  attempt is made to provide value to the site
  visitor.
• Google Bombing establishing links with certain
  anchor text in order to achieve a high ranking
  for that term. Again, this becomes questionable
  when an attempt is made to misrepresent the
  website. (Miserable Failure example)

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Pay Per Click SEM

• PPC ads appear as sponsored listings
• Companies bid on price they are willing to pay
  per click
• Typically have very good tracking tools and
  statistics
• Ability to control ad text
• Can set budgets and spending limits
• Google AdWords and Overture are the two leaders

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PPC vs. Organic SEO
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Basic Tips Optimization Techniques

• Research keywords related to your business
• Identify competitors, utilize benchmarking
  techniques and identify level of competition
• Utilize descriptive title tags for each page
• Ensure that your text is HTML text and not image
  text
• Use text links when possible
• Use appropriate keywords in your content and
  internal hyperlinks (dont overdo!)
• Obtain inbound links from related websites
• Monitor your search engine rankings and more
  importantly your website traffic statistics and
  sales/leads produced
• Educate yourself about search engine marketing or
  consult a search engine optimization firm or SEO
  expert

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Resources

• Statistics Provided By
• Search Engine Watch www.searchenginewatch.com
• Neilsen//NetRatings - www.nielsen-netratings.com
• My own experience, opinion and bias ?
• For More Information
• Various SEO Forums Resources online
• Ephricon Web Marketing www.ephricon.com
• Google (of course) www.google.com

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