Six Commandments of Effective Search Engine Marketing

If you are looking for an effective, low financial risk, low cost way to market your business over the internet, I have good news for you. The answer is Search Engine Marketing with a blend of Search Engine Optimization. Wouldn't be interesting to cut a deal with a newspaper, a magazine or a TV station that would be willing to charge you only if the ad you placed with them is generating results for you? You know what? As crazy as it sounds, there actually is such a mass media outlet and is called Internet.

Now that I grabbed your attention, let me detail six of the most important rules (I'll call them commandments just to ring a about how important they are). If you are not very familiar with the concepts but still believe it sounds promising and helpful for your business, don't hesitate to contact the local Chamber of Commerce. Chambers offer its members and the local business community in general, through programs like "Recipe for Success", many opportunities to become more knowledgeable in the field.

1. Perform SEO
People think they can buy their top position on search engines under the upper and side paid areas. What they don't know is that ranking is another important factor. This is why you first need to push up your website organically, through classic SEO, otherwise you will get lower and lower in the sponsored link section no matter how high you are willing to bid for the keywords.

2. Understand your keywords for every page
Bring your customers to the right page once they searched for a specific keyword. Make sure each page on your website has specific keywords and you don't mix them up to create confusion for search engines and most important, for your potential customers.

3. Check your meta keywords
In order to rank highly, make sure the meta keywords you can see under View-Page view in your browser match the keywords on that page.

4. Always create good content
Content is the King! Google hires so many young PhD's that is no wonder their search engine is able to act exactly like a human mind. There is no way to fool search engines and the better the content is (easy to follow, to the point, wrapped around the keywords), the higher they will rank your website.

5. Focus on WIIFM
This should be the core of your marketing strategy - the question that each and every web site visitor asks with no exception: "What's in it for me?" Pay extra attention to the description of your pages, it's just like the subject line of an email. You need to grab people's attention and you need to do better than your competitors. Who are your competitors? All the other nine websites listed along with yours on the search engine results page. It's a tough competition: "Click me, no, me, me..."

6. Search engine market through Pay-per-Click
You don't want to ignore a strategy that is able to offer you a 300% return on your investment. You obviously have to invest a little bit in order to get a return. This is not only fun, but also very effective.

In the end, there is only one more thing I would like to emphasize: these strategies and tactics are not without risk. Any mistake you make, any wrong word placed on your website might have a huge negative impact on your brand. People talk and you know how quickly words spread out. Only this time it's the word of...mouse.