How to Manage Search Engine Marketing for a Website

You'll need to manage search engine marketing (SEM) to leverage your website for online marketing and traffic. There are many useful online tools that can help you manage your search engine marketing efforts. Take these steps to manage SEM for your website.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Plan your search engine marketing strategy according to the size and age of your business along with your budget and available time. Balance your efforts between free and paid search engine marketing tools. Natural, free search engine listings are valuable to get over the long term. Paid search engine listings will give you the fastest results.

2. Manage your website pages and content for natural search engine marketing. Develop and keep track of your keyword lists and dedicate one web page per keyword. Focus each web page on a specific, relevant keyword and repeat the keyword a few times naturally within the page, and name the page with the keyword.

3. You can manage search engine marketing yourself or hire someone to assist you. On a regular basis, submit your websites to directories and search engines to help get your website indexed faster. The more relevant links you have pointing to your site from other websites, the higher your search engine listing will appear, keeping you more visible online.

4. Let your website pages age and check your natural search engine results over time. Repeat these steps 1 through 4 on a regular basis to get the most out of free online marketing and advertising.

5. For paid search engine listings, you can sign up to be a pay-per-click (PPC) advertiser at one of the popular PPC websites like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. You can test the various websites and keywords by running and managing several PPC ad campaigns with a smaller budget. The most popular is Google Adwords.

6. Consider using paid inclusion websites. You can pay some search engines, like Yahoo, to be included in their paid search listings. The paid inclusion option is typically a one-time fee, which gives you a guaranteed listing in the paid listings section.

Tips & Warnings

• Always stick with white-hat techniques. Search engines change their rules frequently so stay updated by reading blogs and websites. You can search for online tools to find good keywords and check the keyword density of your website. Check Google Webmaster Tools to see that your web pages are indexed with Google.
• Do not use black-hat techniques or your website can be banned from search engines. To be effective in the long run, rely on useful, relevant content and marketing strategies, instead of trying to trick the search engines.

Resources

• Google Adwords -- Paid Search
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Search Engine Watch