There are several Internet marketing strategies a search engine marketing company can perform for you. Let’s start with web design.

A good search engine marketing company doesn’t just design your website. They help you plan it. What language does it need to be coded in? Would ASP best suit your website? How about PHP? What kind of server should it be on? Windows or Linux? What is the best way to incorporate the social media experience into your website? These are some of the questions a good web development firm can help you answer as you make your mark on the web.

Beyond web design, your search engine marketing company should help you determine the best promotional strategies for driving traffic to your new website. Some of those methods include:

• Pay per click advertising
• Article marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Display advertising
• Link building
• Social media marketing
• Directory submissions
• Blog marketing
• Video marketing
• Forum marketing

And that’s just to name a few. The methods for driving traffic to your website could be quite different than the methods used for another website. Since every web business is different, every online marketing strategy should be different. A search engine marketing firm knows that.

For instance, if you are logged into Facebook, you can go to Bing and see what your Facebook friends like. On YouTube, or anywhere.

Google, in an attempt to face off with Bing, created its own social network called Google+. When you conduct a Google search, beside each search result you’ll see a +1 button. If you +1 an item and you set your preferences on Google+ just right, then your friends will be able to see what you plussed on your Google+ profile page, and you they.

But Google takes it another step further than that even. On the search results page, you can see what items your friends have shared on Google+ and you can see other items they have shared on any social network – including Facebook.

Are these social signals exhaustive? Not by any means. In fact, they are just the beginning.

Social search is in its infant stage. I believe social signals in search will become much more important and we are only getting started. It will be exciting to see where the search engines of the future will take us. I can hardly wait to get there.

The only truly effective way to go about search engine marketing is to create a custom plan. What works for one website or business may not work for another.

For instance, not everyone needs video marketing. Some Web businesses, however, couldn’t do without it. And that’s just one example.

Is social media marketing right for you? Maybe. But even if it is, the social media marketing plan you finalize for your business will look very different than the plan for another business. That’s because you have a different product, a different clientele, and therefore require a different strategy. Your social media marketing strategy should be tailored to your business.

Every search engine marketing plan rises and falls on its own merits. Just like every website and every business. You cannot take a generic online marketing plan and make it fit your unique business.

Custom search engine marketing is the strategic implementation of a plan based on careful study and market research. Don’t buy into the hype of off-the-shelf marketing products in a box.

That’s a good question. The answer is, It depends.

How much traffic would you like your blog to receive? How serious are you about search engine marketing? Do you want the search engines to crawl your blog often and update their search engine listings accordingly? Are you doing it for fun or for profit?

Blog marketing is not a hit-and-miss proposition. It is a commitment. The more often you do it, the more likely you are to see positive results. That’s how it is with just about anything. Right?

The search engines view each of your blog posts as a single web page. But they also pay attention to your entire website. Every time yo update your site, they send their spiders back to crawl it. Update it every day and you’ll get crawled every day. That means each blog post you write has the potential to achieve high search engine rankings in addition to your site as a whole achieving those rankings.

Every blog post is a new opportunity. The more opportunities you have, the better your marketing. So how often do you think you should be blogging?

Some of the changes that HubPages has been forced to make include:

• A ratio of words in content to product being promoted
• No more pixelated images
• No affiliate links
• Higher quality standards on over-saturated topics
• No duplicate content

I’m surprised that HubPages ever allowed duplicate content at all, but they did. And that’s one of the reasons that Google slapped them hard, killing them along with hundreds of other “content farms.”

Whether you agree with that decision or not, I think it will lead to higher quality articles on HubPages and it will benefit article marketers who use HubPages. It should benefit the entire ecosystem of online article marketing.

When it comes to article marketing, and any Internet marketing really, you can’t sacrifice quality. Your reputation is at stake with every article you publish. Don’t take the easy way in hopes that you’ll win on a short term gain. Your business is your livelihood and that’s a lifetime achievement.

The actual number is more like 85/15, but let’s not count pennies. The point is, if most of your traffic is coming from search engines, then the majority of your budget should be in search engine marketing.

If you have $1,000 to spend on Internet marketing, you don’t want $800 of that going into social media when most of your traffic is going to come from the search engines. Instead, you should allocate 80% of that ($800) to pay-per-click advertising, blogging, and content creation. The remaining $200 can go into video marketing, social media, and other non-SEM activities.

This isn’t a matter of effectiveness. You can always test the waters and see if you get better results from video marketing, social media, or non-SEM marketing initiatives. If so, then by all means put more money into those channels. But you need to start with a base. That base is 80% search engine marketing and 20% other.

When you have a solid base from which to start your Internet marketing initiatives, it’s easier to track your results. You can set better goals and you can allocate your marketing budget appropriately.

Imagine being a business owner in your local hometown and discovering a new restaurant. You tell your friends how wonderful it is through a service called Hotspot, which, by the way, has recently been rolled into Google Places.

Later, let’s say, you discover the owner of that restaurant is a big user of Google Places and Hotspot. So you friend him. He friends back and notices that you liked your restaurant. He comes to your bookstore to thank you and then saves your bookstore as a favorite place.

That’s The Law of Reciprocity in action.

There’s no better place to practice The Law of Reciprocity than in your own back yard. That is, in your own hometown where you can become friends with other small business owners that are local to you. You patronize their business and they patronize yours. Now, you can let all your friends know about your local connections and personalize your local search experience as well.

Google Places seems to be getting better and better. It’s certainly good for local small businesses.

You’ve heard the expression “content is king.” What that means is any content has the potential to help your site, or your business, rank.

Let’s say, for instance, that your business listing at Google Places has 50 reviews. Forty five of them are positive reviews and five are not. Even those five negative reviews are helping your local business listing rank at the top of the search results for searches related to your niche.

But your website can benefit from negative reviews too. Add a reviews page to your website and allow your customers to write reviews on your website. The more reviews you get, the more likely you are to have that page rank in the search engines for searches related to your business.

While negative reviews can help, you can encourage positive reviews by providing excellent customer service and by asking your good customers to write reviews. If you add your Google Places listing and your website’s reviews page URL to your business cards, brochures, and shopping bag inserts, you’ll encourage customers to write reviews of your business. Provide them good service in the process and they’ll be good reviews.

At the same time, there are many sites crying poor because they copped a hit in search results. These are sites that are businesses and who have good reputations within the online community, certainly not ‘content farms’. The problem is, their sites have internal flaws which, to Google’s algorithm, look like content farms.

The problem with the algorithm change is a simple one. Just because you’re a content farm that doesn’t mean your content is poor. On the whole, eHow’s content is probably average to poor – but there are some very good articles mixed in with the good ones. And the same could be said for millions of ordinary websites, especially mom and dad style blogs.

For many website owners, especially those whose site is their business and their livelihood, the only way forward is to engage a professional to undertake an audit of their SEO strategies. Businesses tend to get caught up in these updates, often unintentionally, but the end results could cost them that business.

If you run an online business, particularly one that has hundreds or even thousands of pages, engage an independent SEO professional who can undertake that audit. Your website may be fine – but in ninety percent of cases, an SEO audit does pick up on errors. Who knows? Fix those little errors and you may climb even higher in the search rankings.

Do you include site links in your Adwords campaign? It is certainly worth having a closer look if you don’t. Site links allow you add extra links to your Adwords ad unit – up to ten for a campaign. Google has, in the past, shown the top four links in any ad unit displayed. Google has now changed this and will automatically rotate these links based on historical performance. This is good news for website owners who have several pages they want to drive traffic to.

In other changes, Google will change the way that domain URLs are displayed. Over the next week Google will modify all ad units displayed in search results so that the domain URL is all in lower case. This is to match the way domain URLs are displayed in search results. According to Google:

In any given month, we experiment with hundreds of subtle variations of the Google search results page, testing everything from font sizes and colors to layouts and spacing, as well as dozens of other variables. Recently, we found that by standardizing the look of the URLs on the page, we were able to improve many of our user metrics, including ad clickthrough rates

I am not sure that a change in the display of URLs will make a huge difference in click through rates, but then, any improvement is bound to be welcome.

The final modification will be a welcome one for those who have drilled down to really fine tune their ads. Negative keywords, in other words keywords, or parts of keywords that your don’t want associated with your ads, had to be set campaign by campaign. Now you can create a set of negative keywords that can be used with multiple campaigns. That will make life a little easier for Adwords users.

Of course, there are many Adwords users that don’t use site links or negative keyword lists when they really should. This could be costing them a significant amount when it comes to wasted or lost clicks. If you don’t completely understand how to use them, then consider working with a team of pay-per-click management specialists to fine tune your Adwords campaign.

Where businesses need to focus, especially new businesses, is on the balance between investing in paid and organic search. It is easy to determine the ROI when it comes to paid search. For this reason, you can target hundreds, sometimes thousands, of keywords. This, together with targeting features, means you can advertise your business to a much wider market.

Organic search can be slow. However, that can work in a new business’s favor. While paid search brings in the bulk of a website’s traffic, organic search can slowly build in the background, especially if you only target a precise set of keywords. As your organic traffic grows, you can start to diversify your keyword list; in the meantime, paid search is still delivering traffic. The overall effect is a slow but steady growth in the business.

A mistake that many new businesses make is to throw 70% or more of their marketing budget at organic search and leave the crumbs for paid search, social media marketing, and perhaps other forms of advertising such as banners. Often, the balance should be reversed with paid search receiving the bulk of your marketing budget while organic search is left to slowly develop.

Every niche is different, of course, and some niches respond well to social media marketing rather than search. A little research and a lot of testing is the best approach. With search engine marketing, achieving a good balance between your paid and organic efforts can result in a profitable business from day one – and a business that will continue to grow over time.

Yahoo! have announced several apps that will make it easier for people to access information on the web.  For example, they can find restaurants close to where they are then book a table by way of OpenTable, the restaurant booking service. What should interest business owners is the launch of Local Offers. As the name suggests, users can click through to see what offers are currently available in their area. Some of the Yahoo! partnerships for this service inlcude:

• Groupon,
• LivingSocial,
• Gilt City,
• BloomSpot,
• BuyWithMe,
• DealOn,
• Zozi,
• CrowdSavings,
• Lifebooker,
• FreshGuide,
• Scoop St,
• Goldstar,
• HomeRun,
• Tippr,
• Coupons.com, and
• Valpak.

Users now can access their Yahoo! page where they can read the latest news, read what’s available at local business restaurants along with free offers from local businesses, all without having to enter a search term.  Google have been working away at making local search (now Google Places) as user friendly and relevant as possible. In fact, they have made one or two interesting changes to local search themselves this week.

Will this change local search in any way? It’s a hard call, and it will depend on how well Yahoo! can sell the feature, and how well it draws he crowds.

The down side to some vertical searches options is that, in reality, they are nothing more than paid directories. Rather than crawling the net and building their own database of pages, they rely on businesses like your own to provide the data. This doesn’t make them any less important, however, since consumers often access them in preference to organic search.

Can you optimize your business for vertical search? Optimize is probably the wrong term in this instance. Where vertical search options exist, business need to follow whatever processes are required to have their products or services listed. For example, Bing Shopping or Google Product search require an up-to-date product feed.

When thinking vertical search, don’t be limited to your niche. Vertical search covers a wide range of search options including blogs (blog search, Technorati), Social (Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed) and video and images to name a few. With this in mind, you may find that through the use of blogs, videos, social media and a product feed, your web site could appear in several different and unrelated vertical search channels.

Vertical search is important in some industries, however, it hasn’t quite taken off when it comes to mainstream internet use  – yet.  Like local search (another vertical), niche related vertical search engines may well become one of the big changes into the future. Mainstream search engines have added verticals (blog, news, image, video, local) over the years and, as their databases become bloated, increasing the number of verticals will become a necessity if they want to maintain quality in search results.

If there are vertical search options available to your business, make use of them. They may not have a major influence on your business today, but they may well do so in the future.

Search engines are constantly changing their approach to search rankings so keeping on top of where their thinking is can be very important. News can also affect your past, present and future actions. For example, with Yahoo! and Ask not determining search results, do you still need the factors that many sites relied on. The keywords meta tag is a primary example – it now appears to be redundant although I know some who use the tag to confuse competitors (how? – load the tag with keywords you’re not targeting).

There are plenty of reports around the web today about Matt Cutts’ talk about Google and the directions of search. If a video of the talk raises its head then it will pay to actually watch it. You will find there are a lot of gems buried away in his talk including an admission that exact domain matches rank higher than they probably should.

Keeping up with the latest news is important when deciding the areas you need to target. This post probably appears to contradict yesterday’s post about avoiding too much information. However, it’s all relative to what you are attempting. If social media marketing is your game then concentrating on that material is important, not SEO. You also need to be able to filter the drivel away from what is important news. Of course, the bottom line is what you actually do with that information – but that’s your call.

• Semantic language indexing is not new. Google has been doing it for years. They’ve gotten better at it, of course, and other search engines have started to incorporate it as well. But none of them have abandoned keywords.
• Type a search query into any search engine and see what comes up. Your first results will almost all incorporate the exact keyword phrase that you typed into the search engine’s search box. That’s evidence itself that keywords are still important.
• Keyword densities, the process of counting keywords and ensuring that you have the right mix of keywords in your content compared to the number of overall words, are not important. In fact, for about five or six years now, they haven’t been. This fact could be the reason for the myth that keywords themselves are not important.
• How many keywords you have in your content is not important. Where those keywords are located within the content is much more important.
• Most search engines these days rely on both keywords and semantic language indexing to some degree.

The advent of semantic language indexing has not made keywords obsolete. It does mean that keywords for the sake of keywords are not important. It makes keyword stuffing much more difficult. Besides that, keywords are still important and I wouldn’t throw them out of my search engine marketing efforts completely.

SEO = Search Engine Optimization;
SEM = Search Engine Marketing

There’s where the similarity ends – or begins, I might say. Now let’s move on to definitions.

Search engine optimization is the practice of using keywords, links, and other on-page and off-page factors to rank a web page in the search engines.

So what is search engine marketing? Well, it’s a bit broader term. It can encompass SEO, but it also encompasses pay per click marketing and any other form of marketing that directly relates to marketing through the search engines.

The key to marketing online is to get your search engine marketing to collaborate with your other marketing initiatives. Your PPC, SEO, social media marketing, display advertising, affiliate marketing, and any other marketing you do online should work together to brand your company and lead to more effective search engine positioning all around. If you do that well then you’ll go a long way to achieving a high impact reputation enhancing marketing drive. That’s what you want, isn’t it?

Online marketing is just another channel for your business. It’s not the only channel, but it’s an important. It will behoove you to learn the principles and then work them to your, and your customers’, advantage.

Specifically, Google’s strong moves into local with their new Places push seem to be going right at Yelp’s core. Sure’s it’s potentially about more than just local venue reviews, but that’s a huge part of it. And that’s what Yelp is all about.

So, Google and Yelp had a deal. Then Yelp pulled out of it. It seems that Google thinks it doesn’t need a deal after all. Perhaps that is why they introduced Google Places. Perhaps Google feels it can do local reviews better than Yelp. But it’s using Yelp content to draw in searchers. Is it sending traffic back to Yelp?

I can’t imagine that Yelp isn’t getting any new traffic from Google Places. It may not be as much new traffic as they’d like to get, but Google has far more users than Yelp has and not everyone who searches for local businesses knows about Yelp. That equates to a good thing. So I’m not sure what this is about really.

Is it just me or is Yelp over reacting? Perhaps they just need to focus on quality search engine optimization.

You can rank No. 1 for any search term if you work hard enough. But will you make any money from that ranking? Bottom line: If your web page does rank No. 1 for an important keyword or search term but doesn’t convert any visitors to traffic then you aren’t any better off than if your web page doesn’t rank anywhere at all. You’re still making no money.

Quite frankly, you’re better off with a Page 5 search result that converts at 50% than you are a No. 1 search result that converts at 0%.

You might want to read that sentence again.

Let’s put it into raw numbers. Let’s say your No. 1 search result delivers you 5,000 unique visitors per month but none of those visitors convert to customers. Either you’ve targeted the wrong keyword or your landing page isn’t written for conversions. That’s a problem.

On the other hand, let’s say your Page 5 search result sends you only 10 unique visitors per month but converts 50% of those visitors. Now you’re getting 5 new customers per month. Isn’t 5 better than 0?

Even if your No. 1 search result converts 1 percent of its traffic, 5 new customers from 5,000 visitors is nothing to get excited about. You’re still only converting 1% of your traffic, compared to 50% from the lower ranking page. It’s all in the numbers, man.

Instead of focusing on search results, you should be focusing on building landing pages that convert well. Optimize them for search traffic, sure. But if you are focused heavily on building links and optimizing for keywords and you forget to optimize for conversions then you’ve wasted a lot of time. And money.

Search engine marketing has expanded a lot in recent years. There are many ways to go about conducting a search engine marketing campaign. Here are some of the ways you can use search engine marketing to boost your business’s performance in the search engines.

• Search engine optimization – Yes, good old-fashioned SEO still works as a search engine marketing tool.
• Pay per click marketing – PPC falls into the category of paid search and it’s one of the fastest ways to achieve great results through SEM.
• Blog marketing – Blogging has become so popular in recent years that everyone knows what it is and you’d think the blog marketing arena is so saturated there’s not any room for more. But there is. And there’s always room for a better one in your niche.
• Content marketing – Commonly called article marketing, content marketing is a little bit broader of a term that also includes marketing with articles. Effective content marketing includes using your network of like-minded website owners to market your content through their sites as well as your own.
• Social bookmarking – Save your best pages on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit and watch your traffic, and your links, soar.
• Link building – Building links is one of those things that everyone should be doing on an ongoing basis.
• Social networking – Just because it’s social doesn’t mean there aren’t search engine marketing benefits. Add a well-optimized Facebook page to your online portfolio and you’ll know what I mean.
• Video marketing – Marketing through videos is just now reaching the beginning of its run, but it will soon be one of the most important search engine marketing channels available.
• Viral marketing – Not so much a channel as a strategy, viral marketing is much misunderstood. But it’s still a great search engine marketing strategy.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are literally hundreds of search engine marketing strategies you can try: Squidoo lenses, HubPages, Knol pages, Blogger blogs (and not just as blogs), customized search engines, Google Apps, etc.

The key take away here is to pick your poison and use it to boost your search engine rankings. Stay away from risky maneuvers and focus on the tried and true.

Bing has changed the name of its bot from MSNbot to Bingbot. But that name change is not all that has changed. The bot is also more adept at crawling non-optimized websites, so Bing says. Take that for all its worth. I wouldn’t purposely fail to optimize my website in hopes that the Bingbot would find room for me in in Bing’s search rankings. That would be foolhardy.

The bright side for webmasters is that you don’t have to change anything in your robots.txt. Bingbot will still respond to calls for MSNbot. In other words, when you look in your log files and see “Bingbot” you can just consider it the same as “MSNbot”. In fact, because that’s what it is under a new name.

So will Bingbot help Bing overtake Google as the No. 1 search engine? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, learn more about how you can sing a song the Bingbot will enjoy.