Get the right kind of traffic. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) means marketing your website to the search engines to gain visibility. The three key components of SEM are:

• Site Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click Marketing
• Link Building

The ultimate goal of an SEM campaign is to increase traffic to your website. But not just any traffic. The customers that come to your website should be qualified, relevant traffic, ready to purchase a product, download a demo, fill out a form, or whatever desired action is appropriate.

Search Engine Marketing is a critical component of your marketing strategy. Like any marketing campaign, you need to rationalize the expense of the marketing with the projected revenue from the new business that is generated. In most cases, a well-executed Search Engine Marketing campaign will pay for itself many times over.

CrestoneWeb.com has been offering Search Engine Marketing services for several years and would be happy to explain how a well-executed Marketing campaign could transform your business.

Site Optimization

Traffic is more than just numbers. SEO is the art (or science depending on whom you talk to) of setting up a website in a way that maximizes its chances of showing up at the top of the search engines. Each search engine has its own set of algorithms or rules that it uses to rank sites for specific keywords and there is not really a one-size-fits-all solution.

Traffic is more than just numbers and a properly executed Search Engine Optimization campaign will allow you to drive targeted traffic to your website for the keywords that are critical for your business. The key is "targeted". What matters most is that the visitors that come to your site are actually searching for your products or services.

For example, if you are a real estate agent in Portland, Oregon you might target keyword phrases like "buying a house in Portland" or "Portland Real Estate Agent", whereas searches for more generic phrases like "homes" or "house" might yield much less relevant results.

Link Building

More links, more traffic, more credibility. Link Building is the process of establishing links from other sites to point to your own. This is one of the most critical components of a successful search engine marketing campaign and the benefits are twofold:

1. Search engines, Google in particular, give a lot of weight to sites that have a lot of inbound links. Inbound links are one way links from other sites to your site. The more inbound links from good, quality sites, the higher a given site could rank - all things being equal.
2. Obviously, having links on other sites pointing to your website can result in the benefit of increased traffic to your site.

There are various ways to increase the number of inbound links to your site.

1. General directory listings – There are a number of free and paid directories where you can establish links to your site. Directories like Yahoo, the Open Directory Project, and Business.com are just a couple of examples.
2. Industry-specific directories and resources – Most industries have industry-specific directories that provide links to relevant websites. Industry specific directories can be valuable because it is thought that Google gives additional weight to sites that have relevant content. For instance, if you are travel agent specializing in cruise vacations; it would benefit you to have links from the major cruise lines. Again, there are some instances where you can acquire links for free and others you will have to pay for. Beware: there are many, many scam artists out there who will charge you to link to your site, and you will get almost no benefit in return. Only deal with credible, established companies that you know your users are likely to use.
3. Complementary sites – While it would be great if you could get your competitors to link to you, you might have to settle for links from complementary sites. For instance, if you are a real estate agent you might be willing to link to sites that offer mortgage services, title companies, etc. These types of links require some effort to establish, but will pay off huge in terms of search engine results.
4. Reciprocal linking – This is when you "trade" links with another site and put a link to their site in exchange for a link on their site back to you. While this is still a very popular technique for building links, it is thought that Google now gives less credit to sites that link to one another if the other site also appears to be doing a similar thing with many sites.

Pay-per-click

Quick results for qualified leads. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a method by which website owners pay to attract targeted leads to their site by bidding on specific keyword phrases. This is a quick way for you to propel your site to the top of the search engines. Another great feature of PPC is you have the ability to set budgets so you can control how much you spend. You have the ability to change the amount you bid on a particular keyword phrase and the changes happen in real-time.

PPC allows you to drive targeted traffic to your site right away without having to wait for search engines to find you. You only pay for the searchers that actually click through to your website. This is a great solution for websites that are pursuing Search Engine Optimization campaigns, but want results without having to wait for the SEO results to take effect.

Feel free to contact one of our pay-per-click experts to find out how you can begin to drive targeted traffic to your website.