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Achieving Tangible Results via Search Engine Marketing
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by
Lee Traupel
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Creating and building effective Search Engine marketing
campaigns is like trying to nail jello to the wall for
many companies! As it typically involves deploying very
specialized processes and melding them with technology.
Here is some insight gained from years of experience
providing these services to our own clients.

1) SE marketing works and drives low cost ROI - over 85%
of most surfers utilize Search Engines to find goods and
services.

2) Its a zero sum game if you use any of the "we submit
to thousands" of search engines service companies, as
these submissions do absolutely nothing to drive viable
rankings. If you aren't achieving listings in the top
20-30 listings then you're wasting your marketing
dollars!

3) Remember the old Hill St. Blues maxim "be careful out
there"? This advice fits well in the SE marketing world
- its digital warfare out there for rankings.
Significant resources are starting to flow into this
market as well, raising the bar and making it fiercely
competitive.

4) Stringent keyword analysis for the HTML text is the
underlying foundation of a successful Search Engine
Ranking campaign - it's analogous to the importance of
ad copy for a conventional print campaign. Most good SE
firms use a commercial database service which enables
them to carefully analyze the relative popularity of
keywords and then build a submissions and optimization
process around selected keywords.

5) The actual Title for your pages will also have a
significant impact on whether or not a campaign works.
It needs to be the right length, typically 6-8 words,
have no hyperbole, and pique a searcher's curiosity.

6) Contrary to endless marketing hype there are no quick
solutions in this form of interactive marketing - it
will take at least 1-2 months before you see any
immediate results. And, for significant results; i.e.
page 1-3 listings via top tier engines add another 2-3
months on top of this on average.

7) Nobody can guarantee absolute results in this market,
if they do, then ask them for a bottle of snake oil!
The only thing we can guarantee our clients are detailed
reports of what we are doing and some references to
other successful campaigns - it's a leap of faith, like
most marketing expenditures.

8) Web site content development impacts good SE
rankings. You need to develop content which is relevant
to keywords. We use linguistic analysis software for our
clients and then build a standalone "stealth web site"
which has content expressly designed for SE spiders
(bots). But, this level of sophistication and
proprietary process is expensive and time-consuming, but
very effective.

9) Remember the Armand Hammer quote about Russia? "An
enigma wrapped inside a box buried deep in the ocean."
This is apropos to the Search Engine world, as the top
tier SE's all change their submission rules and
algorithms a on a regular basis. So, hire a SE firm that
understands the market - it can be very frustrating
doing it on your own and in many cases unproductive!

This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
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