Is Search Engine Marketing cost effective enough to increase profits for B2B marketers? You bet, and here’s why. It’s always been conventional wisdom that the fastest and most efficient way to research products and pricing is on the Web. Now Enquiro has documented survey research on the role of search engines in B2B transactions.
As you know, B2B transactions differ from most consumer transactions because these decisions require coordination between a number of different personnel before the final transaction is made. Therefore, the process requires a period of time between researching the product and placing the order. It’s an ongoing rather than snap decision.
“The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions” is a well-designed study of approximately 1500 participants responding to a 40-question survey that was validated with pre-testing before implementation. You can download the entire report for free, and here are a few highlights:
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It is very important for website administrators and owners to track their website performance. It defines the value of your investments based on all the marketing / advertising that you have done on the site. Unfortunately, many website owners out there don’t know where to start.
So below are some of the useful free SEO tools that every administators to use to track their site performance:
Google Analytic - tracks traffic performance
Stat Counter - tracks traffic and web hits just like Google Analytics
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It is crucial for a website’s success to have effective keywords for a particular site. It is an important part of the process of search engine optimization and making your site more visible to search engines and searchers alike.
So, the first thing you’ll want to do is to sit down and write every single imaginable keyword phrases that someone might 
use in a search engine to find your site.
The important thing to remember in brainstorming is that you should try to think of what you would look for, and branch out from there. The more specific you can get, the better. A good rule of thumb would be to come up with 40-50 keywords and phrases, and then narrow them down to the top 10-20 absolute most effective; which brings us to the question of “how do I know which keywords and phrases will be effective?” In other words, which key phrases will bring more searchers to your site and give them a better user experience?
There are a few keyword tools that have been created especially for this purpose; my two favorites are Word Tracker and Google Adwords Keywords Tool. Both of these sites will be able to tell you how many times in a given time period that particular key phrase was searched for.
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So you have decided to venture out into the world of SEO. The first thing you will need to do is determine the direction of your campaign in relation to the key phrases you are choosing to target. This article will focus on how to find keywords for your organic campaign, as the process is slightly different for PPC.
Many site owners know immediately what phrases they want. If you feel like you know what you want, before you start take a brief step back and assess if this really is the best phrase for your site. Yes, it just may very well be the perfect phrase, but if it isn’t, you could wind up spending a lot of time and money pursuing a ranking that either will never happen, or will provide very little value to your site.
There are a few key areas to look at when choosing a target phrase:
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Meta Tags are what all search engines look at in one form or another to list your web site in a search engine directory. Located in the head of your web page code, your visitors don’t see them but without them your web site won’t get very many visitors.In order for each of your web pages on your web site to be properly categorized by search engine spiders they must contain three very important meta tags.
- Title Tag : This is the single most important tag. It is what search engines will use as the link to your web site within their directory. The title tag needs to contain as many keywords that apply to your page as possible, be no longer than 60 characters long (includes spaces) and be readable so that it will get people to click on it. Without a good title tag your web page stands little chance of coming up high in keyword searches done on search giants like Google.
- Description Tag : This is what you hope the search engine will use for the brief description that is placed after your linked title in the search directory. It should also contain as many keywords that are important to the web page, be no longer than 150 characters (includes spaces) and be a legible sentence. It should reinforce the title making readers want to click on your listing but do not duplicate your title word for word in your description. Some search directories use your web page content in place of this description so be sure your first few sentences of content reflect the purpose of the page and the page title.
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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that webmasters try to implement on their websites, particularly if it’s an online business or if they want a lot of traffic to their sites. Basically, SEO is developing your website in such a way that the search engines will display your site whenever someone does an internet search for specific keywords that you have craftily sprinkled throughout your pages. With the millions of websites out there, it can be very difficult keeping up with the competition so that your site is displayed in the top few search results, or even the first two pages of search results. This article will describe a few things you can do when optimizing your site for the search engines.
Firstly, there are different search engines that people use to find information on the net. The top three that you should be trying to optimize your site for are MSN, Yahoo, and Google. We all want to be at the top of the Google search listings, but it’s a good idea to start with MSN and Yahoo, simply because it’s usually quicker to get indexed and you still get a significant amount of your website traffic from these search engines. You will get more traffic from Google, but it’s a little trickier and probably more competition there.
The next thing you want to do is come up with keywords for your website that you think a lot of people will do internet searches for. This is harder than it sounds and you have to be really careful to choose the right keywords and keyword phrases so that you can beat out the competition. The way to find the best keywords to use on your site is to use a keyword research tool that displays the number of times per month your chosen keyword is searched in the three major search engines. You may initially think that the more a term is searched, the more traffic you will get, but think again! The more a term is searched, the harder it will be to get your site ranked in the top few search results, or the first few pages of search results. You want to choose terms that are less popular, but still have a significant number of searches. A good number to aim for is any term that is searched about 5000-10000 times per month. It’s pretty difficult to do this without using a keyword research tool, such as Good Keywords.
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A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving their performance. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that it can be better found by search engines. The objective of SEO campaigns is to have websites appear in the top listing or first results page of search engines.
Internet search engines, such as Google and A9, maintain a very large database of Web pages and available files. To do this, they devise a program called a web crawler, or spider. This software automatically and continuously surfs and hunts content in the Web. Pages that the spider finds are retrieved and indexed according to text content, giving more weight to titles and paragraph headers. Spiders never stop navigating the web from page to page, to index the relevant content of the Internet. Besides looking at the text of titles and headers, some programs are able to identify default tags and keep a library of these page keywords or key phrases in the index.
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