What is SEM

by

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and covers a range of topics from Searching Engine Optimisation (SEO) to Pay per Click (PPC) and much in-between.

If you want your website to perform well on the search engine results pages (SERPS) then you need to ensure that you have a level of Search Engine Marketing that is correct to the current level of competition and the results you hope to achieve.

You can carry out certain elements of online marketing yourself, even with little knowledge but this can be risky and can actually end up being detrimental to the rankings of your site.

I would strongly recommend that you take advice from a specialist marketing agency who will be able to assist you with the process and advise you on what they think you need to do in order for the website to perform well.

Budget is always the main issue when it comes to marketing, so you need to have an idea of what you wish to spend and be aware of the restrictions you may face if the budget is particularly small.

Using LinkedIn to promote your business

by

LinkedIn can be a powerful marketing tool if used correctly. LinkedIn is a social media sites that allows professional people to join a network of similar professionals or local businesses.

Unlike other social media sites, it is predominately used by companies and individual professional people looking to expand their clientele or business contacts, you do not often find posts and updates relating to personal dramas and situations that are happening to a person.

It can be a great way to meet new people and keep in touch with what is happening in your industry or area. Many businesses gain quite a number of customers through LinkedIn networking and often by just having an active presences on their.

It is often a bit of a numbers game, build up a network of people and share your expertise and company details with them. Some companies will use LinkedIn to find another company that can a supply a service or product that they need.

Social Media Websites Pay Per Click Advertising

by

Facebook is one of the largest social media websites out there with over 1.23 billion users now registered. It is one of the fastest growing companies in the world and can be a great place to advertise your business. Facebook offer a Pay per Click advertising section similar to that of Google or Yahoo. The added bonus of Facebook is that you can chose which audience will see your ad by setting up specific parameters. For example, if you had a wedding dress business, you may create an advert and send it out to all females that have a status of engaged, as they are your most likely customers. Facebook users often wondered why the ads that were shown seemed particularly relevant to them, it is not coincidence, Facebook use the data that they are given carefully show ads to selected groups. Having this type of control allows a business owner to carefully choose where they spend their money and can closely monitor the return on investment they receive.

Create a well performing PPC campaign

by

Setting up a pay per click campaign can be relatively easy, but creating a great one requires a lot of skill and experience. One of the main things you need to do is research. You need to find out what people type in to visitor your site and if those are the type of people that buy from you.

You will need to analyse the traffic to your site in some depth to understand this and it is advised that you employ a specialist web marketing company to assist you with this as they often have software that can find out this information quickly. Once you have a list of keywords you then need to decide which ones you are going to target depending on how much budget you have available.

One of the most important tasks that you need to do once you campaign is up and running is to check back in to the statistics of the campaign to see what sort of results you are getting as you may need to do some further optimisation on it to get it performing well.

Advertising your site on other websites

by

If you can have a link to your site put on another website this may not only help with direct traffic from people clicking on the link but can also look good in the eyes of some of the search engines as it shows that other websites think the information on your site is important. Web marketing of this type should be analysed before you agree to pay for links on sites. If the site is very relevant, for example you may be offering hotel accommodation on a theme park website, then the chances are you will get people clicking through which in turn could convert to enquiries.
A good option to discuss with potential link partners is a trial period of say 3 months. You may agree a free trial or a special discounted price for this period to track how affective it is before you tie in to any long term commitment. Ensure you have adequate tracking software installed on your website to check the results and amount of visitors etc you have acquired from this link, do not just rely on the information provided by the link partner.