Lecture 23
E-Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Instructor: Hanniya Abid
Assistant Professor
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology
Objectives
After this lecture, you will be able to
 Know Search Engine Marketing Techniques
 review the main search engine marketing techniques
for making a company and its products visible through
search engines:
1 Search engine optimization (SEO)
2 Paid search marketing or Pay Per Click (PPC)
Search Engine Optimization
 In search engines such as Google,Yahoo! and MSN Search,
the natural listings are on the left.
 The position or ranking is dependent on an algorithm used
by each search engine to match relevant site page content
with the keyphrase entered.
 There is no charge for these listings to be displayed or when a
link relevant to your site is clicked upon.
 However, you may need to pay a search engine optimization
firm to advise or undertake optimization work to make your
web pages appear higher in the rankings.
Search Engine Marketing
 Search engine marketing is arguably the most important
digital marketing channel for customer acquisition.
 We all now naturally turn to a search engine when we
are seeking a new product, service or entertainment.
 We also turn to search when we become familiar with a
new brand either through offline advertising or direct
mail or through other digital channels such as graphical
display ads.
Search Engine Marketing
 Some transactional sites can generate over half of all their
new business through search, although this will depend
how well-known a brand is.
 For a well-known brand, users may navigate directly to a
site via the URL, but they will often use the search
engine to enter the brand name URL or brand and
product (known as a navigational search).
Search Engine Optimization
 Search engine optimization (SEO) involves
achieving the highest position or ranking
practical in the natural or organic listings on the
search engine results pages after a specific
combination of keywords (or keyphrase) has been typed
in.
How are search engine results produced
 To optimize your position in different search engines, it
is essential to understand the basis on which SERPS are
generated and ordered.
 Marketers who understand the ranking processes can
boost their position higher than their competitors and so
achieve higher levels of traffic.
 SEO is too important to just be left to an agency and
success in search involves training content owners and
editors within a company to create content which fits the
criteria used by search engines to assess relevance.
Stages involved in search engine listing
Source: econsultancy, 2007
Search Technology Processes
Search technology involves these main processes:
1. Crawling. The purpose of the crawl is to identify
relevant pages for indexing and assess whether they have
changed. Crawling is performed by robots (bots) which are
also known as spiders. These access web pages and
retrieve a reference URL of the page for later analysis and
indexing.
2. Indexing. An index is created to enable the search
engine to rapidly find the most relevant pages containing
the query typed by the searcher. Rather than searching each
page for a query phrase, a search engine ‘ inverts ’ the index to
produce a lookup table of the documents containing particular
words.
Search Technology Processes
3. Ranking or scoring. The indexing process has
produced a lookup of all the pages that contain
particular words in a query, but they are not sorted in terms
of relevance. Ranking of the document to assess the most
relevant set of documents to return in the SERPs occurs in
real-time for the search query entered. First, relevant
documents will be retrieved from a runtime version of the
index at a particular data centre, then a rank in the SERPs for
each document will be computed based on many ranking
factors, of which we highlight the main ones below.
Search Technology Processes
4 Query request and results serving. The familiar
search engine interface accepts the searchers
query. The users ’ location is assessed through their IP
address and the query is then passed to a relevant data
centre for processing. Ranking then occurs in real-time
for a particular query to return a sorted list of relevant
documents and these are then displayed on the Search
Results Page.
Ranking Factors
 Google uses around 200 factors or signals within its search
ranking algorithm. These include positive ranking factors
which help boost position and negative factors or filters
which are used to remove search engine spam from the index
where SEOs have used unethical approaches to game the
Google index. We will explore the most important ranking
factors in a moment.
 Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List
by Brian Dean | Last updated Apr. 16, 2014
http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
Site submission
 How do you submit a new site? The good news is that
registration with many search engines is free if you find the
‘Add a URL ’ page (e.g. www.google.com/addurl.html )
where you supply your home page URL and Google will then
automatically index all the linked pages.
 It is recommended that automated submission tools are not
used since these can be considered a search engine
spamming technique. In fact, if you have links from
other companies that are already indexed by a search
engine, many search engines will automatically index your
site without the need to submit a URL.
Key phrase Analysis
 The E-consultancy (2007) best practice guide recommends
these stages for analysis and goal-setting:
A. Demand analysis.
 The key to successful search engine optimization and pay per
click is achieving keyphrase relevance since this is what the
search engines strive for – to match the combination of
keywords typed into the search box to the most relevant
destination content page.
 Use keywords planning tools and traffic estimators
 Identifying the popularity of each search term, its relevance
to the products or services qualified by the ‘intent of the
searcher ’ indicated by the phrase and the competition on it.
Key phrase Analysis
 For example, this list of seven different types of keyphrases is
taken from an Overture representative talking at Search Engine
Strategies in 2004. Examples for ‘ car insurance ’ :
1 Comparison/quality – compare car insurance
2 Adjective (price/product qualifiers) – cheap car insurance, woman
car insurance
3 Intended use – high mileage car insurance
4 Product type – holiday car insurance
5 Vendor or brand – Churchill car insurance
6 Location – car insurance uk
7 Action request – buy car insurance
8 Provider type – car insurance company, car insurance supermarket .
Key phrase Analysis
B.Performance analysis.
This assesses how the company is currently performing for these
phrases. With the right tracking tools and tags, it should be
possible to report average position in natural or paid listings;
Click volume referred from search; Click quality(conversion
rates and ideally bounce rates to compare landing page
effectiveness); Outcomes (sales, registrations or leads);
Costs (CPC and CPA); profitability (based on cost of sale or
lifetime value models).
Key phrase Analysis
C. Gap analysis.
Identifies for each phrase and product where the biggest
potential for improvement is, so you can target your
resources accordingly.
D. Set goals and select keyphrases.
You should identify the different types of keyphrase you want to
be visible for. Particularly important are the strategic
keyphrases which are critical to success.
Improving search engine ranking through
SEO
 Fortunately there are common factors that influence
search engine rankings.
 The challenge for SEOs is that there are many ranking
factors.
 The most important factors which can be managed, these
are:
On-page optimization
External linking
Internal link-structures .
On-page optimization
 The most basic test of relevance by the search engines is the
number of times the phrase appears on the page.
 However, there are many other factors that can also be
applied.
 In its guidance for Webmasters, Google states: ‘ Google goes
far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and
examines all aspects of the page ’s content (and the content
of the pages linking to it) to determine if it ’ s a good match
for your query ’ .
On-page optimization
These other factors include:
● Frequency
● Occurrence in headings h1 , h2
● Occurrence in anchor text of hyperlinks
● Markup such as bold
● Density (the number of times)
● Proximity of phrase to start of document and the gap
between individual keywords
● Alternative image text
● Document meta data
On-page optimization
Alternative Image Tag
 Graphical images can have hidden text associated with
them that is not seen by the user (unless graphical images
are turned off or the mouse is rolled-over the image),
but will be seen and indexed by the search engine.
 For example text about a company name and products
can be assigned to a company logo using the ‘ALT ’ tag or
attribute of the image tag as follows:
<IMG NAME ‘Logo’ SRC‘logo.gif ’ ALT‘Car insurance’>.
On-page optimization
Document meta data
 The three most important types of meta data are the
document title tag, the document ‘ descriptions ’ meta
tag and the document ‘ keywords ’ meta tag.
 You should try to makethese unique for each page on
your site(s) since otherwise Google may assess the
content as duplicate and some pages may be downweighted in importance.
External Linking
 Boosting externals links is vital to your SEO efforts
although it is less easy to control and often neglected.
 The founders of Google realized that the number of links
into a page and their quality was a great way of determining
the relevance of a page to searchers, especially when
combined with the keyphrases on that page.
 Google algorithm has been upgraded and refined
continuously since then, the number and quality of external
links is still the most important ranking factor.
External Linking
 While natural links will be generated if content is useful,
a proactive approach to link-building is required in
competitive markets.
1. Identify and create popular content and services .The starting
point for both natural and proactive link-building has to be
to think of the value of your site and different types of
content or services on different pages. The acid test is
whether your visitors will bookmark a page of your
content or tell a friend about it. Think not only about the
home page, but also other pages within the site
External Linking
ii Identify potential partner sites .There are several options to
find partner sites. It is helpful to try to identify the types of
sites that you may be able to link with, for example:
● Directories of links (often less valuable)
● Traditional media sites
● Niche online-only media sites
● Trade associations
● Manufacturers, suppliers and other business partners
● Press release distribution sites
● Bloggers including customers and partners
● Social networks.
iii Contact partner sites: A typical sequence is:
● Step 1. Write e-mail encouraging link (or phone call to
discuss from someone inside the company will often
work best).
● Step 2. Follow-up link .
● Step 3. Setup links.
THINK LINK-QUALITY NOT LINK-POPULARITY
Internal links structure
 Many of the principles of external link building can also
be applied on your own sites.
 Benefit is that you have control of the linking although
impact is less than from links from external sites.
 It is important to consider how you can increase the
number of internal links to pages.
Summary
 Search Engine Optimization
 Search Technology Processes
 Keyphrase Analysis
 External Links
 Internal Links