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?

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
Agenda
• What is a Search Engine? (1/2)
• What is a Search Engine? (2/2)
• Why Search Engine Marketing?
• Major Search Engines (1/2)
• Major Search Engines (2/2)
• A Search Engine’s Goals & Objectives
• Anatomy of a Search Engine
• How Do Search Engines Work?
• Ranking Factors
Presentation by Jon Payne
President, Ephricon Web Marketing
• What a Search Engine Sees
• So What is the Algorithm?
• What’s an SEO?
• What Does a (good) SEO Do?
• What SEO is NOT
• Farms, Black Hats & “Ethics”
• Pay Per Click SEM
• Pay Per Click vs. “Organic” SEO
• Basic Tips & Optimization Techniques
• Resources
Ephricon Web Marketing
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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
What is a Search Engine? (2/2)

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
Why Search Engine Marketing?

• 85% of all traffic on the internet is referred from a search engine

• 90% of all users don’t look past the first 30 results (most only view top 10)

• Many websites aren’t 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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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)

1. Google – 41.6%
2. Yahoo – 31.5%
3. MSN – 27.4%
4. AOL – 13.6%
5. Ask Jeeves – 7.0%

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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)

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
A Search Engine’s 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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
Anatomy of a Search Engine

Search box

Sponsored Listings
aka PPC

“Organic” Results
aka SERPs

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
Ranking Factors

• On-Page Factors (Code & Content)

• Title tags <title>
• Header tags <h1>
• ALT image tags
• Content, Content, Content (Body text) <body>
• Hyperlink text
• Keyword frequency & density

• Off-Page Factors
• Link Popularity (“votes” for your site) – adds credibility
• Anchor text

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
What a Search Engine Sees

• View > Source (HTML code)

• http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html (HTML text, no

images and little formatting)

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
What’s 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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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 website’s 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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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!

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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)

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing
PPC vs. “Organic” SEO
Pay-Per-Click
• results in 1-2 days
• easier for a novice or one without much
knowledge of SEO
• ability to turn on and off at any moment
• generally more costly per visitor and per
conversion
• fewer impressions and exposure
• easy to compete in highly competitive market
space (but it will cost you)
• can generate exposure on related sites
(AdSense)
• ability to target “local” markets
• better for short-term and high-margin
campaigns
Presentation by Jon Payne
President, Ephricon Web Marketing
“Organic” SEO
• results take 2 weeks to 4 months
• requires ongoing learning and experience to
reap results
• very difficult to control flow of traffic
• generally more cost-effective, doesn’t
penalize for more traffic
• SERPs are more popular than sponsored ads
• very difficult to compete in highly competitive
market space
• can generate exposure on related websites
and directories
• more difficult to target local markets
• better for long-term and lower margin
campaigns
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 (don’t 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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing
• http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

• http://www.sitesolutions.com/analysis.asp?F=check&B=A4E72D
63-A8D5-4352-A7BA-9D5E930E1A5E
• Keyword check

• http://sitereportcard.com/

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing
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

Presentation by Jon Payne

President, Ephricon Web Marketing Ephricon Web Marketing