Search marketing, in laymen’s terms, is a discipline that factors Web design, content, and promotion to enable your brand to gain visibility to potential clients online.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines utilize programs—called “robots”, “crawlers” or “spiders”—to collect data from websites. This graphic identifies the data used by search engines to rank Web pages. The data are indexed, and then complex algorithms determine which Web pages are appropriate results for a specific search. Proper Web marketing techniques provide the spiders with information to index your site accurately, ensuring that your Web pages appear as a top result for relevant searches.

For example, a San Francisco law firm specializing in auto accident injuries would want its website to appear near the top of results for the search term “San Francisco car accident lawyer.”

How Is Search Marketing Improved?

The algorithms that the robots use evolve constantly, so it is important to monitor and adjust online marketing constantly; this is not a one-time investment. This graphic depicts the science of search marketing. Optimization of your website is accomplished several different ways, including good content, back-linking and appropriate keywords. Avoid ill-fitting keywords, duplicate content and, worst of all, spammy links. Below is an examination of the good, the bad and the ugly of online marketing.

The Good:

Good content sounds easy, but can be somewhat challenging. Search engines evaluate a Web page based on its ability to fulfill a searcher’s need. The need might be to solve a problem, purchase a product or understand new information. Search engines rank results to provide the searcher with the Web pages that best meet that need. The law firm in our San Francisco example would want content that accurately describes its services so it would appear in searches for car accident injuries, not child custody cases.

It is critical to have appropriate keywords in your site’s pages. Generally you want to optimize keywords that describe your geographic area and service specifically. “Car accident” too broad in focus, because many aspects of car accidents are outside your service range. Optimizing for “car accident lawyer in San Francisco, California”, however, will bring in the clients who are searching for those specific skills. Google’s Keyword Planner is a tool that will help you determine the optimum keywords and key phrases for your Web pages.

Backlinks, sometimes referred to as “inbound” or “incoming” links, are votes from other websites for your site. Backlinks can be thought of as a popularity measure for search engines, because the more authoritative backlinks a Web page has, the more likely they are to trust the page for their users. An effective way to increase your backlinks is to promote the sharing of great content in your company blogs, press releases and social media accounts.

The Bad:

Duplicate content is just what it sounds like: the same content appearing on multiple pages. It is frustrating for searchers, so search engine algorithms purposefully remove duplicate content from search results. Duplicate or thin content can cause search engines to distrust the entire source, resulting in lowered website rankings.

Ill-fitting keywords are also easy to understand. A firm targeting the keywords “catastrophic injury attorney” will not appear in searches for “car accident lawyer” because the keywords do not match. Targeting popular keywords do not guarantee high rankings, though, if all of your competitors are targeting the same search terms. The key is to find specific keywords or key phrases that are searched frequently and that you can compete with other sites to gain visibility with.

The Ugly:

Spam links are the lowest of the low for search engines. If a website has many backlinks with the same anchor text or links from low quality content or sites, Google’s “Penguin” algorithm can devalue a site from ranking in its search results. Google sees paid links as manipulating their algorithm; and can penalize both the site linking and the site linked to. All website owners need to be more diligent than ever in knowing who is linking to them. For more information about Penguin, read this.

What Does Google Look For?

Google holds almost 67% of the search engine market share (as of October 2013), so its algorithms require some dedicated attention. Two tools in particular need emphasis: Panda and Hummingbird are algorithms that highlight the importance of quality, original content and excellent keywords.

Panda was launched in February 2011 to focus on the whole experience of the website. Panda was built to devaule sites that were using thin, duplicate, and / or manipulative content. For years, sites could over-optimize for particular keywords or scrape content from other websites and enjoy good rankings..

Hummingbird, launched in August 2013, improved Google’s ability to interpret the meaning of a search by using all the words in a search query. The change shifts focus from the individual keywords to the meaning of the phrase. Hummingbird advances the work of “Conversational Search” and takes it beyond factual points of information. This article highlights the capabilities of Hummingbird.

In Conclusion

Search marketing is a complex exercise. Building your website requires a delicate and ever-adjusting combination of content, links and content.