Welcome to SEMLaguna!

We will share our Search Engine Marketing knowledge with you through the experiments and tests that we do – regardless if they are met with success or not. To get things started, we have prepared a Primer for your intellectual consumption; to perhaps ready you for the articles ahead.

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the term used to describe the various practices implemented online and offline to make a website visible on major search engines and consequently attract visits from Internet users. The search engines use sophisticated algorithms (formulas) to give each website a relevancy score based on the search words (aka keywords) used in a website.

I. What is Search Engine Optimization and why do we need it?

Internet traffic is driven by the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. They continue to be the best “square one” of web navigation for most Internet users – a medium that can make (or break) an organization. Other efforts such as website design, usability, content, and all other services or products you develop have higher odds of actually getting offered to clients and customers with the help of SEO. Simply put, a company or organization can take advantage of the endless traffic opportunities from search engines through SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is first and foremost a discipline that involves changing or improving certain elements of your website and increasing the number of external links (from other websites) pointing to yours. It is further subdivided into two factions: On-page and Off-page SEO.

A. On-page Optimization

On-page SEO includes efforts that occur directly on your website.

• Copywriting – Compelling copy that brands and markets a product or service well to the customer is important. Good content, however, also plays an important role for you in ranking on Search Engines. Copy starts out with the most appropriate domain name that reflects your brand name. The most relevant words or phrases that users might type into search engines should be inserted in the body of the contents as well.

• Coding – Optimizing the HTML code includes creating title tags, alt tags, meta tags, and hyperlinks. These are important factors in helping the search engine spiders properly classify your site. (Search engine spiders are software robots that “crawl” Web pages, reading text and following links to gather information to be stored on their massive index).

• Design – A website’s contents should be easy to read, navigation must be user-friendly and intuitive, the layout and design should be consistent on all pages, but most of all, the website should be quick to download.

B. Off-page Optimization

Off-page SEO includes all search optimization efforts that occur outside your website.

• Link Building – Being linked on sites that are related to a company’s industry is essential. This must be done because search engine spiders move from site to site across the World Wide Web by following hyperlinks. By being listed on high quality and popular sites, the search engine will place a website higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

• Social Media Marketing – As the name itself implies, Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the strategy of building community sites on the Internet. These sites can either concentrate on a certain topic or be as generic as possible. Through Social Media Marketing, you can create pages that provide links back to your site (for generating more traffic and link building efforts). A few activities under SMM include Blogging, Article Submission, Press Releases, Forum Posting, and Communities. The ultimate goal of this visibility is to have the power to influence – once you have a voice, marketing becomes a soft-sell, rather than a hard one.

II. Paid Advertisements

Search Engine Marketing, on the other hand of things, involves paid advertisements to help increase the traffic that your website gets. Paid search strategies include paid inclusion, search contextual ads, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns, and more. Pay-Per-Click Campaigns (PPC) help capture prospective clients by buying keywords that triggers your advertisement to be shown when typed on the search box.

III. Affiliate Marketing

This is a system of revenue sharing between two sites: you and your advertiser. An ad or text referring (linked) to your site will be published on your partner’s site. The affiliate will receive a fee based on the amount of traffic generated by the advertisement posted on their site.

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Of course, the actual complexity of SEO can’t be farther from the seeming simplicity of what is written above. Make no mistake that Search Engine Optimization is a long-term engagement – ranking does not come in a form of points that you can purchase for just one time, leave it at that, and enjoy being in the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for eternity. While ranking well overnight has a decent amount of probability of happening, most efforts will require patience in awaiting the results of your initiatives.

And when something does not work, you simply move on to the next test.