Just as the web is constantly evolving so, too, is your company’s standing within the millions of pages that can be generated by a single search. SEO is a process that should be monitored on an ongoing basis in order to achieve the best results.

At the heart of SEO lies your choice of keywords that appear in the text of your site and in each page’s header. The words or phrases describe in broad terms what your business does, and the specific products or services you offer. The first step in your company’s foray into search technique should be to make a list of the keywords that are most relevant to your business.

Brew City Marketing helps you select the best keywords by starting with generic terms and then hone in on more specific words that are related. Once we have a set of keywords we use a keyword tool that tells us how many times a given keyword or phrase has been searched over a certain period of time.

Once keyword selection is complete, the words need to be coded into your web page’s meta tags. These are special commands that describe the content of a particular page. They are invisible to the regular web browser, but are picked up by search engines as they crawl the web looking for pages to return in search results.

In addition to keywords, search engines consider the viewable text of your site relative to other sites, in order to determine its position in the result. There are a few key points to consider when trying to make your site’s content more attractive to the search engines.

There isn’t a set of rules that will guarantee good results every time – the search engines tend to change their scoring methodologies in order to keep sites form tricking them into playing favorites. It is important to find a search marketing agency like Brew City Marketing that is up-to-date on the latest tactics.

Paid search works via an auction system. You select and bid for search terms for your product or service. Once you have paid for the term, the price of which is set by the top bidder, you develop a text-based advertisement for posting alongside the natural results, and then pay-per-click when users click on your ad and land on your web site. The advantage to this type of marketing on the search engines is, with an effective buy, your ad can appear near at the top of the results.

Major search engines offer exercises to help you select search terms and phrases that might be worth a bid. If you’ve already done keyword research for your SEO efforts, these can be a good starting point. Once you’ve selected search terms to bid on, you need to choose a geographical range in which you’d like your ads to appear.

Then you need to consider two budgets – how much you’re prepared to spend over a period of time and how much you’d be willing to allocate for each click through to your site.

Marketing on a mobile phone has become increasingly popular since the rise of text messaging. Unlike traditional marketing methods, it is permission based, relatively inexpensive, and immediate. It is a excellent way to get extremely targeted impressions because even if consumers don’t redeem the offer, 95% of them saw your business name.

Benefits
o A text is typically read within 15 minutes of receipt
o Redemption rates are 12-30% compared to only 1-1.5% for direct mail.
o Measurable
o Targeted
o Permission Based
o Immediate 

A form of permission advertising, email marketing basically means that customers have opted-in to your publicity announcements via their email addresses. It creates nurturing relations with customers who have already expressed an interest in your products and services and can generate new sales and retain current clients.

The first step to develop an email marketing campaign is to collect email addresses. Your web site should be set up to encourage people to submit their email address easily, usually by offering something in return such as a coupon or subscription to an e-newsletter.

Once you’ve established a list, you’ll need to consider how you want to reach out to customers. You can generate revenue through email announcements and in-store sales or the availability of coupons. Or, you can use it to generate awareness about new products, key staff you have hired, or to share expertise on a topic that will interest your customers.

Typepad, WordPress, Blogger, and Blogspot are just a few options to create a forum within minutes. Blogs, which can include text, links, and pictures, enable readers to participate in the conversation by submitting comments or starting discussions around your posts.

Many businesses have started blogs, and they can be a very effective way of positioning yourself as an expert in your field thereby engaging the attention of a group of consumers interested in the products or services you offer.

While blogs can serve as an excellent marketing tool for your business, be aware: Your blog entries shouldn’t be too polished, sales-oriented or too long, as readers will often be turned off by a hard sell. Instead, use a blog to give an authentic voice to your business and brand. It can be equally important to keep your blog current: Frequent updates – every few days or so – need not be time consuming and will encourage readers to revisit it on a regular basis as well as to pass your blog on to their friends and colleagues.

Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace are hugely popular, and with good reason. These social-networking sites present users with an opportunity to become members of like-minded, interconnected communities that can relay messages – in words, pictures and sound – with great ease and speed.

Advertising on social networking sites allows the opportunity for very select niche communication. These “social ads” could be a great starting place for you to test your online marketing messages among a self selected audience who have identified themselves as being interested in the product or service you have to offer.

How do you keep track of your websites’ success?

Your web strategy would be incomplete if you didn’t take advantage of its key difference from traditional marketing channels – the flexibility to change strategy on a dime. The information you gather form you website can help you determine with product offers are working and which are not, whether your affiliate marketing strategy is effective, and how well your keywords are working in the search engines.

Collecting and interpreting this data is known as web analytics and there are a number of basic metrics you can use to track your success. However, before you even implement your campaign – let alone measure it – it’s important to be clear on the goals for your site and have a solid understanding of your target audience. Your bottom line may be to drive sales and revenue, but your web site can also contribute to lead generation, building a community around your business or generating brand awareness and PR, and you can set up your site to track any interim goal.

Every month, Brew City Marketing emails your Web Analytics report. You can easily extract some common measures of site performance such as:

Hits

Each file downloaded from your site is known as a hit. Files can include images, scripts and anything else the web browser needs to allow a user to view the page. If, for example, your homepage contains four photos and an HTML file, five hits to your site will be recorded, even though only one user has visited your page. As a result, hits are not a reliable measure of visitors to your site.

Unique Visitors

You can get a more accurate measure of who is coming to your site by looking at the number of unique visitors.

Page Views

Each time a visitor comes to your site, you can find out how many pages are looked at – the number of page views. This is more a useful measure of activity that can tell you how deeply your visitors engage with the various areas of your site.

Referrers

The sites from which your visitors arrive. This is an easy way to measure the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing strategy. If you need more detailed analysis such as understanding the paths, or routes within your site that customers are taking before they make a purchase, a more active measurement, known as page tagging, may be appropriate.

Brew City Marketing helps you determine a balance between using analytics as long-range check on the direction of your site and a day-to-day tactical tool.