Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing - It’s important to maintain your branding and identity, but also use your website as a tool. You can still have your site designed exactly how you vision it but also can work as a marketing vehicle for your business, and still be presentable.

Search Engine Usage Information: Nielson/Net Ratings of May 2008:
59.3% - Google | 16.9% - Yahoo | 13.3% - MSN | 4.1% - AOL

This means 94% of all searches going through four search engines, and a majority going through Google.

Tip: Google Trends is also a quality tool to research what keywords people are searching for. This is an exceptional tool when researching your online keywords for search engine placement, and search engine optimization.

For Google, 72.3% of visitors are natural or organic SEO listings. These are non paid listings. 27.7% use the paid search engine marketing SEM plans like AdWords etc.

MSN is quite different. 28.8% of visitors are organic, and 71.2% are paid listings.

You have seen all the paid ads from Google, MSN, and Yahoo… the ones on the top and right side of the page. They do work but can cost quite a bit depending on what you want to pay for someone to click on your ad. This could be as little as .10 up to $2/$3 depending on how many other people are in the same market.

You have two choices. Pay for placement or you can have your site organically placed with the correct design and search engine optimization. If your site is search engine friendly then you can implement a search engine marketing plan SEM. What does this look like?

Example: Local target market selection, keyword placement, content, link building, and evaluate your positioning after changes are implemented.

We redesigned a website in a content management system and seen almost immediate results. When the site was redesigned it was on page one, two, and page three of all major search engines in seven days vs. on page fifty and not being found at all.

Tags: Fargo Marketing, Marketing Moorhead, online website placement, Search engine marketing, search engine placement, SEO Fargo