Arizona internet marketing has to keep with the times to stay competitive.

Internet Marketing Strategies, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) have evolved three very distinct meanings. Knowing how to craft a successful internet marketing campaign takes each of these techniques.

Internet marketing has changed radically over the past five years. It hasn't stopped changing for an instant and chances are it won't for some time to come. To get oriented you need a grip on the basics. This discussion will give them to you.

What is an Internet Marketing Strategy?

When we refer to an internet marketing strategy, we refer to the whole topic of promoting and selling on the internet. It might involve SEO and SEM or it might involve traditional marketing such as print, telemarketing or broadcast. Typically, your internet marketing strategy contains all three. Identifying these factors early on allows us to develop content plans that achieve objectives and reinforce the value of your entire marketing effort. The entire premise of internet marketing strategy is that you might have built a good website but if nobody comes, it does nothing for you.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a collection of techniques that are used to influence rankings of a website in the indexes of software agents ("robots", "spiders", etc.). Included in this definition are also the directory engines which utilize humans to index web content. For both robots and human-review directories the objective is the same: get them to like you enough to rank you within top 30 for your topics or customer search terms. Get them to like you more than your direct competitors. Search engine optimization requires careful research to establish search trends in the public at large, scrupulous content planning to take advantage of key page variables, keeping up to date on changes to major search engines, submissions methods and pay-for-placement deals that get results. Search engine optimization is not a one-time effort but a commitment to staying one step ahead of the competition. Click here to see our page full of links to SEO tools you can use to plan your own online strategy!

What is Search Engine Marketing?

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing has now come to mean all of the other ways to gain prominence in various search engines. These come down to two categories: Pay-per-click and pay-for-placement. Each of them can get you shown on search engines or other websites as an alternative to SEO but is more prudently applied to extend the reach of your marketing in conjunction with SEO. With pay-per-click you literally pay every time someone clicks on your "link". With pay for placement, you pay on several conditions: sometimes for "impressions" which is how many times your link was displayed to somebody, charges can be based on time as with many banner services, there are affiliate and revenue sharing deals to be considered. The web has become a very competitive place with a lot of savvy players. Frequently is takes a serious, sustained effort to attain and maintain good search engine rankings-and the sales that come with it.

How important is Internet Marketing for my Arizona website?

The importance of SEO (and SEM) are not universal for all websites. Obviously in the case of an intranet, SEO is meaningless: those who need to know of specific functionality know already. For strictly B2B sites, SEO is often of negligible value. For most retail and sales scenarios, SEO has become critical to success. Determining this importance is a key upfront requirement in your internet marketing strategy because of it's profound influence on content planning for your website. Where SEO is of less importance, more emphasis and consideration can be given to design. Where it is of greater importance, design is subverted as a consideration to some extent by two factors: we are now producing a product for robots as well as humans and we want them each to love us. We are forced to insert much search-string language in a fairly rigid format.

We're very proud of our internet marketing services at dataSpheric. We get results. Our confidence is based on experience.

Check out some of out success stories!

Here's exactly how we do it

You've probably guessed that all this information isn't just for Phoenix web marketing or Arizona internet marketing initiatives. The truth is that this information is universal. When we focus on our local area, the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, we can reduce the focus of our market and avoid having to compete with national (or international) players but this is purely a marketing strategic consideration.

"Put yourself in the path of the customer" is a universal marketing adage. To find the power in this truth for your internet marketing strategy you have to know where that path is--and how to get yourself onto it.

We see all kind of figures that try to tell us how many people use search engines to find what they are looking for on the internet. It's hard to be precise but we believe that roughly 60% of all online inquiry begins with a search engine. Of these we believe 30% will "click" on something on the first page of results. 80% of those remaining will find something to click on within the next two pages of results.

Since most engines display 10 search results to a page, this means that you have to be in the "top 30" in your category to be deriving real benefit from search engines.

This isn't as easy as it might sound. Those top 30 positions are hotly contested and your competitors are making money from being there. It's a literal game of "king of the hill" as you fight your way to the top--and then try to stay there.

Search engine optimization in the simple sense consists of thee things:

• Finding out what the popular search strings are for your product or service.
• Finding out who "rules" this "space" on the search engines.
• Putting together a plan to beat them.

Finding out the popular search strings is called keyword research and it's done through services like Overture and Wordtracker. Our SEO Links page will give you every tool you need to plan your own online strategy! We have to warn you though, it takes a couple of years to get the hang of and it takes a LOT of time to do correctly.

Finding out who rules the space you want to be in pretty much consists of finding out who comes up on various search engines for these keywords. Make careful note of your competitors, what words they "rank" highly on, what their marketing message is, what kind of information they offer on their site.

This leaves putting together a plan to beat them. The good news is that you don't have to be perfect, just better then they are. More specifically, better than one out of 30 on at least one major engine. The bad news is that for the most popular search engines today, that's getting tough to do based on anything but quality of information.

You see, search engines today want to reproduce the success of Google, who unlike other engines, set about to offer people good, quality information that they could use instead of bombarding them with advertising and results from the highest bidder. And they are all changing their process to more closely resemble Google's (although Google still relies heavily on link popularity for ranking). What it definitely means is that quality of information, all else being equal, will win.

And not just any information! It has to be:

• On topic
• Concise
• helpful

And we also note:

• Things linking to it should be on topic
• Things it links to should be on topic

And finally we note:

• If you are too repetetive or if you employ what the search engines consider "spam" YOU CAN BE PENALIZED BY GETTING DROPPED ALTOGETHER.

With this in mind you are about to develop your website copy content plan. No, we don't mean you're going to copy sombody's website, we mean copy like copywriting.

The basic objective is to tell about what you do or what you sell in (go ahead, guess) an on-topic, consise and helpful way. Tell them what's unique, educational, instructive or usefull about your topic. Then blend in the keywords that we have determined are best for your marketing purposes from our research. And we'll do this in a very carefully contrived way.

As mentioned before, the way in which your keywords are integrated into your copy are frighteningly important. Keyword "stuffing" or "spamming" will get you in trouble. In general, we want to repeat keywords as a certain percentage of total wordcount. We also want to make sure we put them in certain strategic location on your web page.

From a keyword perspective, a typical page copy content outline might look like this:

• Title tag: top keyword once.
• Meta description tag: repeat key strings once but no more than 15 in most cases.
• Meta keywords tag: repeat all keywords and strings, now delete redundant strings, now delete reverse-orderings of most strings.
• Insert primary keywords into copy near top of page.
• Insert these into the middle of page copy.
• Insert these into the end of page copy.
• Make sure these are used as the first words in at least 2 sentences.
• Make sure the top keywords are boldfaced at least twice.
• Go back and insert lesser keywords and strings.
• Make sure language is grammatically correct, good spelling.
• Hide popular misspelled words in comment tags.
• Use key words in image alt tags.

Go ahead and write your keywords in for each line, repeating them as indicated. That takes care of the keyword side for now.

Now you have to write your informative, original, on topic content. Don't worry about the keywords, if they happen to pop up ignore them, if they start popping up all over the place they are OK as long as you are just being specific in your description of your subject. If your dialogue wouldn't sound moronic to the layman, let it happen. Tell the whole story, don't forget to insert a call or two to action to your customer and get ready to do something different.

Next compare your informational literature with your keyword content outline. Check off the words that you have already in their locations. Then go to work getting ones that aren't where they are supposed to be in there. As always, it has to sound natural.

Now if in all of this you can still make people want to buy what you have to sell then you have pulled it off. Many times we use professional copywriters but it can be done by patiently following the rules and getting someone to proofread it for you as you go. By balancing customer marketing objectives and search engine requirements we achieve the balance between getting seen and getting paid.

Your new copy content should be ready to be integrated into a visual content plan which is in the hands of the web designer. But don't relax too much, keyword search trends have a way of shifting and you need to keep up on them. Additionally, your competitors will have a habit of shifting their strategy to keep up with you. It is in fact a never ending battle.

We haven't covered every topic incidental to keyword optimization and content but we hope that you not only have some insight into the tasks of SEO but a real tool-the SEO keyword copy content outline-to help you achieve results for yourself. It's very time consuming and takes some experience to get the hang of. If you need help with your Phoenix Arizona web marketing initiative go ahead and call us at dataSpheric!