Search Engine Marketing

[metro]

I am looking at exploring a new marketing avenue through search engine marketing, while I know a little about it, I haven't used it heavily. Can anyone more tech savvy offer some advice. Any website they recommend going through? I am mainly interested in coming up in Google and Yahoo searches. Also I am not interested in pay per click advertising at this time.

[Dark Jedi]

Read google's guide on it. A warning: they watch the tricks the people who offer to get you listed high for money, and more often than not, you will be worse off than before if you go that route.

You will have to google the guide, I don;t have a link to it at the moment.

[actionman]

The best thing I can recommend is read places like The #1 Affiliate Marketing Forum :: ABestWeb :: and stick to the basics. No tricks. Build good pages with good useful content and changes occasionally . Make sure you have all of the correct things in title tags and meta tags. Use google webmaster tools and the webmaster tools that Yahoo and MSN has. Don't try to game the system.

[metro]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I've gone through the Google "Guide" and it's not very helpful. What I'm talking about is paying for key searchwords when someone google's something to find your services. I know by doing proper tagging and meta-tags on a website will help, but doesn't paying to be at the top of search engines also help??

[Dark Jedi]

Google Adwords works, but research your chosen keywords extensively.
Search for your product in simple terms, many ways and see who comes up first. Check their links and metatags, and see what keywords are common.
use those in your Adwords ad, and you will show on the sidebar whenever someone searches for your product. I used this for my business, and it worked pretty well. no where near as well as getting to the top of google searches naturally.

The way I got ranked was content. I made several pages where I kept relevant data, logs, updates, and info about northern Colorado Offroading. As useful sites, other related sites would link the info, raising my ranking. The links brought customers, and the google ranking brought customers.

And suppliers monkeying around killed the whole business off. but that's a different story.

[eataroundokc.com]

Here are a few links to some good articles that explain the basics of SEO and some simple ways to give your site a leg up. The trick is to identify keywords that you have a chance of ranking for but still bring in traffic. There are a lot of keywords that are super popular and have way too much competition, but often there are smaller, related keywords that still get a lot of traffic yet have less competition. There are tools like Keyword services for professional search engine optimization that can help you identify the right words to target, but they do cost to use.

Top 10 search engine optimization techniques | web design news and style

Giving Your Website an SEO Check-Up | Vandelay Website Design

SEO Checklist | Element Fusion Internet Development

[metro]

Yeah, I ended up doing a SEO and an AdWorks campaign. Seems to be working well and generating 300% or so more web traffic. I furthermore limited my campaign within a 30 mile radius of the metro (by IP address).