Search engine marketing is one of the primary internet marketing strategies that many online entrepreneurs rely on for building successful internet businesses. It mostly revolves around tailoring your website and its content to rank higher in the search engines where it will get exposure to a lot of traffic and drive targeted visitors to your site. But for a search engine marketing campaign to be effective, certain core components must be included in the SEO strategy. They include but are not limited to the following-:
Keyword research
Proper keyword research is the first step towards the development of a successful search engine marketing strategy. It is out of keyword research that you will discover the particular words or phrases people interested in your products and services use the internet.
It is also based on keywords that the search engines will know when to return your website as one of the results whenever the relevant searches come through. Using the right keywords in search engine marketing is, therefore, important in driving targeted traffic to your website.
Meta Tags
Meta tags help in letting the search engines understand the content and the context of your web pages and they still play very important roles as far as search engine marketing is concerned. Whenever a keyword is entered into the search engines, the search engine spiders will go through the Meta descriptions of various websites with the aim of trying to identify if it is relevant to the incoming searches.
Though Google claims that this feature is no longer useful since it has been abused by many webmasters, insider reports indicate that Meta tags still play a significant role when ranking websites.
Quality Content
Gone are the days when you would throw poor content spammed with the main keyword and hope to get a top spot in the search engines. To get it right with content in the current search engine marketing landscapes, the content must be of good value not just in the eyes of the search engines but most importantly to the website visitors.
Google keeps on updating its algorithm on a regular basis to reward websites with authority content with good rankings while punish those with thin content by giving them low rankings in the search engines.
Authority Backlinks
With regards to search engine marketing, it is normally said that if the content is king, then backlinks are queen. And it is not a matter of the number of backlinks but rather the quality of the links. A solid search engine marketing strategy, therefore, must include a proper link building schedule that will see the web assets getting authority links linking back to the website for higher rankings in the search engines.
Social Media
A search engine marketing strategy will not be complete without active social media accounts. The search engines give a lot of eminence on the activity of a website on the social media due to the interactivity of the social media. If the social media is always active, it implies that the products or services offered by the business are providing good value to the users and the search engine rankings of that website will be improved. Ignore the social media in your search engine marketing strategy at your risk.