Search engine marketing, in the broadest sense, refers to a set of strategies and techniques designed to help companies benefit from the activity that takes place on internet search engines.  That activity is important because  internet search has increasingly become today’s equivalent of the “yellow pages”; buyers use their keyboards and mice to identify shops that want to visit rather than their fingers “doing the walking” flipping the yellow pages . Yellow page publishing was always been a very good business (although much less a good business since Google and the search engines came along)   because it combined the user’s specific and strong buyer interest with a set of product and service categories.  Google and search engines in general are able to do that in a much more efficient manner by matching the search query with advertisers (who needs print anymore?).

The rising new discipline  of search engine marketing has to do with activities,  both paid and unpaid, that attempt to garner a significant share of the links that a search engine user might use after getting a result page from a search engine.  Within the discipline, practitioners differentiate between “search engine optimization’ (SEO) which are techniques and practices designed to improve rankings within the search engine’s “free” or “organic” listings, and “search engine marketing” or SEM in the narrow sense which is management of the search engine’s paid advertising services.

Given the volume of traffic and revenue that can follow successful implementation of SEO and SEM strategies, it can safely be said that these new disciplines are among the most competitive marketing activities ever undertaken.  There are literally thousands of self-proclaimed experts in the field, and given that Google never reveals the secret algorithms that determines winner and losers, it makes it extremely difficult for a buyer of SEO and SEM services to fugure our there to turn.

At Resolute Digital, we offers a few words of advice.

1) Your SEM or SEO vendor has to extremely familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (or another major analytics package).  Without a detailed understanding of these tools, they (and you) will be “dancing in the dark: which will surely cost you money.  We’re not talking about finding vendors that are “Google certified” because we’d like our analysts to be independently trained.    We don’t think it makes a lot of sense to use vendors that are trained by the company selling you the advertising.

2) Your vendor should be very comfortable with the more robust analytics software like Omniture, Unica, or Clicktracks (Lyris) since you may decide to avoid the Google “free” packages [Google supplies the software free of charge but gives itself a license, if you accept the Ts&Cs  to your data].

3) Your vendor needs to have programmers who are familiar with the APIs (application programming interfaces) of Google, Yahoo , and MSN (Bing) since it is virtually impossible to find efficiencies in these systems without using large volumes of keywords which requires an automated interface to manage (image managing the bids of 10 million keywords manually!).

4) Your vendor needs to have programmers that are still active.  Don’t sign up for an agency that uses software written 10 years ago.

5) From an SEO (free) perspective, signing on with the wrong vendor can land you in a Google “doghouse” that might takes years to get out of.  The initial SEO activity is all about details: select the right keywords to optimize for,  getting unique title  tags and meta description associated with each distinct page or url, and rewriting urls to simple and memorable urls if needed.  After all that, it’s then a process of identfying the right sites to link to you, contacting them, and convincing them you are worth a link.   Any shortcut in this process of likely to get you in the dreaded doghouse.

There are obviously many more details and issues to consider, but the above tips are enough to get you started.  When you are ready to work with a professional, give us a call.

TinyURL is a web page redirection service that substitutes short aliases for longer, presumably hard to remember urls. Created in 2002, it has been of limited use on the web and has occasionally been misused by affiliate or scam websites that wanted to get clickthroughs without showing their domain identify. [All domains can be tracked back to their owner through the domain registration system administered by VeriSign].

The explosive growth of Twitter has dramatically increased the visibility of the tinyurl service because Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters per posts, doesn’t want a lengthy url to take up too much of the limited space. Typically tweets now contains dozens of tiny urls as the user references followers back to expanded content, usually on a blog.

It has not gone noticed in the SEO community that Twitter back links can be valuable in helping a website increase its page reputation, especially with Google. It’s not uncommon to see Twitter links  appearing in the first page of results to “link://www.yoursite.com” Google searches, which displays the list of inbound links to your site. So many webmasters would like to use Twitter to help increase the reputation of their sites.

The rub is if the back link is in the form of a tiny url, you can pretty much forget about getting any page rank boost from the link. As a result of the spotty reputation of tiny urls in the past, Google devalues any tiny url back links.

Twitter doesn’t automatically rewrite all urls as tiny urls. We’ve tested shorter urls up to a length of 31 characters and found the original links preserved. At the same time, we have found links of 41 characters to be rewritten as tiny urls. We’ve also found that longer “non working” urls not to be rewritten, so they must be employing some kind of test to see if the page displays. It doesn’t not seem to matter how much content precedes the 31 character url, as long as it stays within the 140 character limit. We haven’t had the time to test this extensively, so we’d be interested in hearing what other Twitter rewrite testers have found.