Define your business

A successful search engine marketing campaign starts not with the engines, but with your own site and with the site's users (i.e. your customers). The goal or intended outcome of something. It is important to define the purpose of the website as one of the first steps in the planning process. A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the planning process. Setting short and long term goals for the website will define more the purpose and plan for the future in terms of expansion, modification, and improvement will take place.

Set targets for your campaign

Before embarking on any marketing campaign, online or otherwise, you should have a clear idea of what you hope to achieve. It may be to increase traffic to your site, to receive more inquiries from site visitors, or to increase the value of new orders. By understanding your customers and your competitors, you will be able to tailor your product effectively to fit the needs of your target audience while not duplicating products already on the market.

Translate your business definitions into search phrases

Make a list of words and phrases that describe your service. Try them out in search engines to see what sort of results get returned. View the sites of leading competitors in your field and look out for useful words in the text of their pages.

Structure your site around your search phrases

Sketch out a map of your site, with pages categorized into sections. Each page should be given a title that reflects the search terms that you are targeting for that page. This map can act as the basis for your site.

Design your pages to attract search engine traffic

These design guidelines are specifically intended to increase the likelihood of a page being relevant to a given search phrase, but they also work pretty well for humans and are unlikely to make your pages any less readable. True images, animations and designs are one of the important elements because somehow this makes a site more fun and less boring. But excessive use of this elements would just make your visitor get irritated so limit your animations and images because content and clear identified goal still matters.

Submit your site to Directories and Search Engines

Before submitting your site to any directories, you should be satisfied that the/ TITLE/ and /DESCRIPTION/ of your home page reflect your most important search terms and that they convey the right impression of your site. This should be the text that is submitted (if you've already submitted a different description to Yahoo, it is very unlikely that you will be able to persuade them to change your listing).

Get your site linked from other sites

Identify other sites that offer complementary services which are likely to be of interest to users of your site; link to them and invite them to reciprocate. In particular, do this with popular sites and do it with those sites that appear near the top of searches that use the keyword phrases that you are targeting. Link building is not all about search engine optimization, it's not about boosting your Google Page Rank, it's not about publishing a link directory and it's not about swapping links with as many other websites as possible. The reality is that many people are disappointed with the trickle of links and the trickle of traffic that their efforts produce.

Monitor the results

Check your ranking on the major search engines for your most important search phrases and your site coverage (i. e. the number of your pages indexed) on the major search engines.

About the Author

This article is created by Ms. Riya Estrada an article contributor for Webworksfirst