Well done your website looks beautiful. You have spent a couple of thousand dollars with a graphic designer and you are very proud. Unfortunately, you have spent all this money decorating your shop but it is stuck down some dodgy muggers ally and gets no foot traffic past it.
This is why you need SEM. You want to bring your shop out from the dark ally, into the light on the main road or in the mall. You want lots of foot traffic because a percentage of that foot traffic is going to pop into your shop and buy what you are selling.
How does SEM do that? First you have to let Google or Bing know you are there. Type in Google webmasters on Google. Follow the easy instructions and submit your site. Now Google knows you exist. This is quicker than waiting for Google to come and crawl your site.
Let's hope that your new website is a WordPress site. Google loves WordPress sites as they are structured and ordered. Remember that Google is one giant computer and it loves structure. If you got talked into going the route of the custom built website and thought WordPress was the cheap cop-out. Then you made a mistake. In this article we will assume that you are using WordPress.
OK so now we need to increase your visibility on the search engine results page. By this we mean that when someone puts in a search term for something you sell, we want your website to be popping up on page one. You will still get hits if you are on page two or three but it will be drastically less. Probably insignificant compared to being on page one. This is what we mean when we talk about your ranking.
Before we start to optimize your site, we need to do some keyword research. What products or services do you sell? What terms would people use when looking for your products or website? Once you have chosen some keywords, you need to research which ones will work best for you. Do this using Google AdWords. You want to choose words that have low competition and a fair number of hits. It will probably be better for you to choose some long tail keywords. The less competition there is, the quicker you will rank for these keywords. It is better to be sending some business to your website quickly than trying to rank for a highly competitive keyword that might take months.
In my next article SEM 2, I will be discussing two ways in which we improve your ranking. Firstly on site optimization or on page and secondly off site with back links.
Thanks for reading. Hope you found it informative. Please feel free to leave comments. I will try to answer your questions.
So you have read all of the above and are starting to panic. It seems to complicated but you now know it is necessary. Fine no worries. Click on this link and have it done for you http://www.seosurgery.co.za/search-engine-optimization/
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