what is search engine marketing

What is Search Engine Marketing?

The techniques of proper search engine marketing are fairly simple. It involves making changes to your website that make it target specific, relevant keyword phrases. When a user searches for one of those phrases in a search engine like Google or Yahoo, your website should rank at the top of the results for that search. When people find your site, your website will become one of the strongest marketing tools in your arsenal.

Of course, actual search engine marketing work becomes a bit more complicated in practice. Getting your site high rankings can depend on a number of factors, such as:

• The website structure
• The website navigation
• An intro page or Flash movie
• Overuse of Flash
• Dozens of other items

Website Review
The first thing that Cirque Marketing does when you contact us for SEO is to review your website and determine how easily your site can be adapted for search engine optimization. We can then give you input so you will know what challenges your current site will face. This review will be a good indication of how much work will have to be done on your site in order to get you the rankings you want and how long it will take.

Where Will Search Engine Marketing Get Me Rankings?
Generally speaking, organic search engine optimization will get you rankings on all of the first tier engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Each of these engines works on their own time frames, so some of them may take longer than others. Experience has taught our team that there are certain processes to speed up this time frame. Additionally, organic seo will get your website ranked on many other tier two and tier three engines, although their traffic levels and market share are not nearly as significant as the tier one engines.

Will I Have to Change My Site?
Any search engine marketing campaign will involve some changes to your website. Usually these changes will involve both visible changes to your website, "behind the scenes" coding, and changes to portions of your content. The depth of these changes is dependant on how tough the competition is; thus defining how aggressive our approach should be. Also, depending on the results of your website evaluation, other changes to your site's structure and navigation may be required. Making these changes is always the result of a collaborative effort between Cirque Marketing, you, and your web development staff. Quite often these changes not only make your site more search engine friendly, but also more user friendly in the process.

What is Search Engine Marketing, Isn't it Just About Title and Meta Tags?
In the late 90’s, it was very, very easy to get high rankings simply by stuffing certain parts of your page full of keywords. Since then, the search engine world has changed greatly and using those techniques are far more likely to get you removed from the search engines instead of getting you good rankings. These days, achieving high rankings is a combination of dozens of factors that requires us to stay constantly on top of the most recent changes. At the end of the day, creating a high quality website that is easy to navigate and delivers great content is the most important factor in any sort of search engine marketing campaign. This is what Cirque Marketing will help you achieve.