Chip Wilson's Blog

If you wish to market anything online, you will need to figure out how to let people find your online presence.  That generally happens when a prospect conducts a search.

This is the first in a series of articles designed to help marketers master the various forms of search marketing.  In order to effectively use any tool, you first need to understand how it works.

With that in mind, this first article will explain the foundation on which search marketing is built – the search engines, why they exist and how they function.

Origins

Search engines were invented to act as a sort of interactive directory, or map to the Internet, and are as varied as the programming which allows them to access info on the Web. They’re like asking a Genie to take you on a magic carpet ride on the “information superhighway”, determined by exact or general word-match keyword queries. The trick to search engine inquiries is to be as exact as possible (where it is more prudent to be so, and where you have a more exact niche, product or subject in mind), and more general where required. Then, the web crawlers, “robots”, or “spiders” roam the Internet, in search themselves for the most interesting, and best-linked web pages.

This simply means that if a customer merely wants to comparison shop for cookbooks for sale on the web, for instance, they would just type in “buy cookbooks”. If they wanted cookbooks for vegetarian cooking, it would be “buy vegetarian cookbooks”. If they wanted cookbooks by a specific author, they would type in “buy rachael ray cookbooks”, etc.

How they work: Indexing

In a technical sense, the way search engines work is that they take the keyword search term(s) you type in, and parse, or acquire and analyze, an immense amount of information found on the World Wide Web. They then return to you a list of results which are headed by the best-indexed web page on down to the most vague, or least indexed web page for that search term. What this tells the searcher is that this first result, or web page, is the one with the highest “credibility” for their search term, and is the number one suggested page for them to view. This either gives your customers what they’re looking for, or at least helps them refine their search query, in order to narrow down search terminology and pertinent websites with each successive search.

The process of indexing a web page by a search engine happens over the course of at least a couple of months, up to years, or the life of that web page or site’s existence on the Web. Indexing is simply the cataloging of web sites, and is either natural, or organic, or is the result of web optimization, or SEO (search engine optimization). Basically, there are two ways to find a website on the web: through an organic search, meaning you know the site and type in its URL or a variation thereof, or you type in keywords which, if that website is either well-indexed or optimized, lead you in the most expedient fashion to it.

Any website, or consequently, business venture, has keywords which define its nature, or niche market. Keywords truly are the keys to the door of any given website, as well as the bridge to and language, if you will, of the search engines themselves. Knowledge not only of your company’s basic keyword terms, but of secondary search terms and how to incorporate them into your web content, is crucial to having clout with the main search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Pay Per Click and Search Engine Marketing

Pay per click, a.k.a. PPC, or CPC (cost-per-click) search engine marketing models allow a person with a website/business to pay to have an ad and a link to their website appear in “sponsored links” which show up on the right side of the top search results. This is a fast-track method of getting your name and business seen on the web, apart from organic searching and optimization, and is a highly effective way to generate business via the Internet. PPC allows you to market your business in international markets in many different languages, and even on mobile phones now. You can do banner ads and smaller image ads on both the web and mobile phones, and are able to run the ads at specific times and dates, for as many keywords as you can dream up. You’re not charged for the extra keywords, only the clicks you garner.

Linking For Better Organic Search Results

The other feature which has major pull with the search engines these days is linking. This is equally as important as keyword optimization, and a defining factor in why search engines exist. How well-linked is your website? Ideally, your site should have a links page for outbound linking, as well as a good amount of inbound linking (other websites linking to yours). A combination of these elements will get you well on your way to scoring highly, or being well-indexed, with the major search engines.

Conclusion

To sum up, search engines exist to help you find what you’re looking for via the keywords contained in your website. Following the words is having relevant content, meaning that it should be informative, helpful, non-spammy, keyword-rich (but not overly so), and, crucially, linked to other websites, as well as being featured and linked back to your site on as many sites as possible. This is why search engines exist, what they do and how they do it, in a nutshell.

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