How to Be a Google Rockstar: An Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
What is $#%& is Search Engine Marketing?
Search Engines are one of the most popular methods of finding information in the 21st century.
Gone are the days of opening an encyclopedia to find the answer to a question or skimming the yellow pages to locate a local specialist. Search engines are helping us tackle every conceivable problem that we happen to face in our daily life.
Need to do research on the Civil War? Car having problems? Curious about evolution? The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Search engines provide a means to possibly answer any question that anybody has at any time. So how can this help us in promoting your music?
To start, let’s discuss how search engines work, without boring you with too much technical mumbo-jumbo.
Search engines consist of a number of very sophisticated software programs that gather and organize information from the internet. The first important program is called a “robot spider” that is used to index, or “find” pages posted on the internet. The search engine then uses an algorithm, or mathematical equation, to determine how important a web page is in relation to a particular word or phrase (referred to as keywords or keyword phrases.)
Let’s use an example to better understand this concept. Say you went to Google.com and entered the words “los angeles pizza”. The results are numbered starting with #1; Google is telling you that, based on its very sophisticated mathematical equation, that the number one listing is the most relevant web page for the words “los angeles pizza ”. Hopefully, that # 1 listing will provide you with the information you are looking for.
Now imagine if you were a prog rock band in Los Angeles, and your website just so happened to rank in the top ten Google results for “prog rock band Los Angeles. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how this listing is an important marketing tool.
Now, before you jump out of your seat, hold on, because it gets better. There are software programs available on the web that will show you how many times a word or phrase is being searched. This is where the dynamics of search engine marketing really start to shine.
In traditional marketing, like television or radio, demographics are used to determine what audience you should target your business to. A commercial for a kid’s cereal would probably be shown during a children’s television show. TV companies would charge more for an ad spot that ran during a show that attracted more viewers for a specific “target market”.
Super Bowl ads are the most expensive because the program attracts the attention a millions of 18-35 year old men who tend to spend quite a bit of money on consumer products, thus the crazy amount of money that is spent of advertising.
With search, however, the information that is collected helps us target our websites (which are a basically commercials that run 24 hours a day) to a more specific audience; we can actually pinpoint roughly how many people searched for the words “prog rock band Los Angeles ”.
Now if you are someone in a prog rock band, this information is very important to you. Ten years ago, the only way of marketing your business would be to purchase advertising that probably targeted a large number of people, usually in a local fanzine. You would have a good idea about your audience, but you didn’t have any real numbers of how many people were looking for your product.
With search engine marketing, it’s possible to focus marketing campaigns on just people that are actually looking for the kind of music you create or where you are located, saving you precious time and money that would otherwise be wasted on those not interested in you. This is why search engine marketing is especially important to musicians, who usually do not have deep pockets to spend on marketing and advertising to begin with.
Another important concept that musicians need to consider is whether or not they rank in search engines for their own band name.
Let’s face it, many who come to see you play live may not remember your website address or MySpace URL, and the only way they are going to be able to find you online is by “googling” your name. If you rank in the top ten of Google for your band name, then you’re money. If you don’t, a potential fan may just decide to give up searching for you and move on to something else.
This is perhaps the most important reason why search engine marketing tactics need to be applied to your website and marketing strategy. If no one can find you online, your potentially losing out on sales and fans. Plus, if you rank # 1 for your name (which can be an easy thing to do or a very difficult thing to do based on the words in your name), it adds a bit of legitimacy to your music and proves that you are the “real deal”.
Search Engine Marketing has taken the business world by storm, and has propelled search engines like Google to become huge, billion dollar corporations through their advertising revenues. Traditional media has begun to transform as the barriers between television, radio, print, and the internet begin to blur. The internet has introduced a new performance-based marketing and advertising platform that has spilled over into other forms of advertising.
Understanding the actual process of marketing your website through these search engines is crucial in understanding how the marketing industry is evolving but requires a balance of research and continuous implementation. To discuss more about how search engine marketing works, we’ll have to dig a little bit deeper.
The Myth of the “Flashy” Website: Why Search Engine Optimization is Important to Your Website.
We know how important getting your website listed at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) can help in marketing your website. Now we’ll discuss what actions need to be taken in order to rank high for specific search engine results.
Sometimes referred to as natural placement or rankings, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing, or getting the most out of each and every part of your website.
When I talk about your website, I’m talking about everything—every word, every graphic, every piece of HTML code that is used to build your website contributes to where you’ll show in search results. Understanding the search engines’ ranking algorithm, or mathematical equation, is necessary in order to determine how to properly construct a website.
Let’s use an example to explain this concept. Let’s say you build two websites to promote your band:
Website # 1 features lots of flashy graphics and a few words, but no articles or content about your band. The titles of your webpage are “Welcome”, and your pages feature links to “About Us”, “Contact Us”, and “Buy Now”.
Website # 2 features some graphics too, and each graphic contains “alt text” (words used for text-only based browsers) in the HTML source code. This is used in case the graphics don’t load properly in the browser. The title of the site is “Prog Rock Band Los Angeles – The Proggers | Home”. The site also features a lengthy article about your Los Angeles-based prog rock band known as “The Proggers”, making sure to use those keywords frequently when necessary in the text. The page also features links to other pages online like “the history of prog rock ” and “where to see us in Los Angeles ” in addition to the Home, About, and Contact links.
Now imagine doing a search in Google for the keywords “prog rock band los Angeles”. Which website do you think will have a better chance of appearing at the top?
If you guessed # 2, congratulations; website # 2 has been properly optimized for the keyword phrase because specifc parts of its HTML code features one or more of the words in that phrase.
It’s as if the website is talking to the search engine, telling it “I know a lot about prog rock in Los Angeles!”
Now this example is just a very simple exercise to show you how search optimization essentially works; the actual process is far more complicated then just adding a few words. As a matter of fact, in the early days of search, it was that simple, and many took advantage of it for a little while.
However, as search has evolved, so has online optimization, and now has become a complex process of keyword density and placement. Some spammers try to “stuff” keywords in their websites hoping to achieve high rankings for their websites; search engines have advanced software to know when keywords and keyword phrases are being over used, and actually penalize these sites and “kick them out “of any search results. As a sometimes delicate art, search engine optimization is just one step in climbing to the top of a search result. An even more complicated task, perhaps the most elusive of any internet marketing tactic around, needs to be addressed.
Tips & Resources for Optimizing Your Website
Site architecture – the first thing you’ll need to address if you want to rank is how your website is constructed. This directly influences what the search engine spiders see when they crawl your site.
For example, if your site is made entirely in Flash, a search engine spider will never see the text and links that are involved in your content. While recently Google has made it known that it is getting better at crawling Flash documents, it’s still not a good idea to build a site completely in flash.
The key in having good site architecture is having a simple design and simple navigation throughout your website. A search engine spider should be able to arrive at your site and immediatley read the content on your site – your meta information, your text, your links (which should always be text as well),etc.
We could talk for days and weeks on all the different things you can do to create better architecture for your site. Hopefully, you’ll decide to use a simple CMS like Wordpress to make things a little easier on yourself. While Wordpress out of the box isn’t entirely perfect for SEO, it’s half way there when it comes to having a crawl-able site.
Understanding Important Tags in SEO – The next important thing you’ll want to understand is how to use the proper tags in your website. and how each relates to your rankings.
The first important tag you’ll need to learn about is your “title tag”. This tag should reside in your header file. Here is what it looks like in your html code:
Here is what it looks like when viewing a web page:
And here is what it looks like in Google:
You can see now right off the bat why having a proper title tag is so important. Not only does Google use this as one of the major ranking factors, it also uses your title tag in it’s results.
Many websites use words like “welcome” as their title tags. These websites usually do not rank for any kinds of keywords!
Doing the proper keyword research will help you figure out what kinds of keywords you’ll want to have in your title tag, in addition to your band name of course, which is a given.
And don’t think stuffing a million words in your title tag is going to work. Keep it to a few major keywords, and make sure that every page on your site has it’s own unique title tag. Again, this is easy to do when your using an optimized CMS like Wordpress.
Other tags you’ll need to optimize include your “header” tags: h1, h2, h3, and so on.
These tags are used in various subject headings on your site. For example, you might have an “about the proggers” page; the words “about the members of the proggers” would more than likely be an h1 tag, with other tags used for band members names, album names, etc. Learning when to use these tags and how to optimize them properly will also contribute your SEO success.
Doing Keyword Research – One of the major points I’ve made is how important your keyword research is and how it will ultimately affect your rankings. Fortunately for you, there are many wonderful tools out there that will not only show you how many times a specifc keyword phrase was searched in a given time period, but also how competitive that keyword is and whether ot not you even have a shot at ranking for it.
Listen to me when I say this – ranking for keywords is big business, so don’t get any crazy ideas in your head that you’re going to rank for “Van Halen” or some other band’s name. You’re not going to rank for “rock n roll”, not without a huge budget and a few years of serious link building. I’ve been doing this for years and can tell you this is a tough, very competitive industry.
Focus on the “long tail”, and more importantly your band’s name, each band member’s name, your song titles, lyrics, and target keywords geographically. You’ll have a much better chance and be happier with your work if you start off small with targeting these kinds of keywords, and can use that to build and hopefully rank for some more competitive words as your site grows.
Here are some very helpful blogs, forums, and resources I have been using for years to learn and understand SEO. I have picked some different topics from each site to give you a general idea of the different concepts involved in SEO; however, please spend some time using each site, as they are some of the top resources out there, where much of my expertise in SEO is based on.
- Search Engine Land’s “Organic” Column
- Matt McGee’s “How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes”
- SEOMoz’s “Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization”
- Bill Slawski’s “Content Planning for Search Engine Optimization”
- Michael Graywolf’s “How To Figure Out What Parts of Your Website Aren’t Being Crawled”
- Holistic Website Design at Cre8asite Forums
- SEO Copywriting at the Search Engine Roundtable
- SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
- Wordpress SEO: The definitive Guide to High Rankings for Your Blog
Why Getting Links to Your Website is the Secret Key to Ranking in Google
Perhaps the most important element in search engine marketing, especially when trying to achieve high search engine rankings in Google, is the number of highly relevant, quality inbound links you have pointing to your website.
To refresh, a link (or hyperlink) is what we click on to travel from one website to another. Much like a popularity contest, the number of websites that have links to your website will tell the search engines how popular, or relevant, you are to a particular keyword phrase. In addition, the quality of the website that links to you, and the actual word or phrase used in that link, are just some of the other factors involved in the search engine’s link algorithm.
We’ll use examples again to help illustrate this concept. This time we have two websites about a electronica-rap act. Both sites have been properly optimized for the keywords “electronica rap music ”, and are hoping to achieve high rankings in search engine results. Let’s see how each site’s inbound link building strategy will affect their rankings.
Website # 1 has gotten 27 links from other websites. Each of those websites simply used the words “electronica rap music ” to describe Website # 1. Most of the websites linking to website have nothing even remotely relevant to electronica or rap music.
Website # 2 has gotten 400 links from other websites. While the text for each site varies, most are using the words “electronica rap music ” to describe Website # 2. In addition, most of these websites deal with information relevant to rap or electronica music.
So which one will achieve higher search engine rankings?
Again, Website # 2 would achieve higher rankings. In this case, Website # 2 has optimized links related to the targeted keyword phrase as well as a large number of quality relevant websites linking in to the site.
Now, as noted with search engine optimization, Inbound link building and optimization is a far more complex exercise than this example; but you see now how the two are used by the search engine to determine it’s relevant search engine results.
As with other factors, inbound linking habits are constantly changing as the search engines evolve their ranking algorithms; it’s not as easy to get quality inbound links as it used to be. You see, search engines strive to produce highly relevant results to a keyword search. As more people understand and manipulate these results, the more complex the search engine ranking programs become.
Ultimately, it is quality content that proves to be the only lasting factor to real search engine success. With highly optimized, relevant content that is updated frequently, your website will get the attention it deserves. People will read and use your quality content, and if it’s good, others will link to it from their websites and your search engine rankings will improve. It’s easier said then done, and can take weeks if not months to begin seeing results. So, while you’re waiting for your rankings to skyrocket, there is one to do in the meantime: enter a little form of advertising that’s made the search industry the new 800-pound gorilla in advertising: PPC.
Tips and resources for getting highly optimized, inbound links to your website
Understanding Google PageRank – When it comes to getting links to your website, it’s important to understand the factors that Google uses to determine what a good link is and what a mediocre link is.
You see, one of the most important factors Google uses to determine a link’s “worth” is it’s “PageRank”. PageRank is a number, ranging from 1-10, that Google gives a website based on a number of important factors, including:
- age of domain
- # of highly relevant websites that link to the website
- # of highly relevent links THOSE websites have
- # of “authority” links a website has (“authority” links are links from very popular and well known websites that are an authority in their niche)
- age of links
- time frame of links aquired
- number of links pointing to main domain/index page
- number of links pointing towards internal pages
- number of outgoing links
- many other link factors
Creating viral content – a very effective way to obtain links to your website is by creating engaging viral content to entice bloggers and webmasters to link to your website. There are many different factors involved in creating a piece of viral content, but when done right can work wonders in getting you ranked fairly quickly.
A piece of viral content can be a number of things – a blog post, an article, a list, a tool – anything that others on the web find useful, funny, or entertaining can become viral and get highly relevant links to help you improve your search engine rankings.
Usually viral content requires a lot of creative thinking and research, combined with the right timing and utilization of popular social media tools. Constantly creating good content is key if you want to play in the search engine sandbox!
Networking your content and understanding anchor text is perhaps one of the most tedious, yet valuable ways you can go about aquiring links, and is accomplished through a very simple technique – asking for them!
However, it’s not as easy s it sounds. People all over the ‘net are begging for links every day, and it will be up to you to learn how to approach a webmaster or blogger into giving you a link. Utilizing social networks, learning how to approach those on the web who control links, and understanding how to get the right anchor text in your links will either make you or break you in the link aquisition department.
Here are some awesome resources to help you get links to your site. Again, I have picked some different content to get you started, but each of these sites has some of the best content out there on the subject and are considered the experts on building links.
- Stuntdubl’s 12 Different Types of Links and How to Get Them
- Aaron Wall’s 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website
- Jim Boykin on Link Building and Emails: Humans Do It Better
- 11 Experts on Link Building Speak Out by Sugarrae
- Debra Mastaler’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective Link Builders
- Dan Zarrella’s Viral Marketing Campaign Checklist
- 6 Successful Elements for Social Media Success
Buying Your Way To the Top of Google with Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Ever wonder how Google and Yahoo went from tiny search engines to huge media companies in just a few years? Most of their fortune lies in their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programs, called Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions.
Pioneered by a division of Yahoo known as Overture, the PPC advertising model has transformed the way we advertise business. Ever noticed that the top 3 search results in Yahoo’s search engine are always called “sponsored results” and are inside a blue box?
Or how about the “sponsored ads” that run down the side of Google’s results pages? These are examples of the PPC advertising model. Let’s discuss a little bit about how they work and why they are so popular.
Let’s say we do a search on Google looking for “autographed baseball”. The results appear, along with the “sponsored results” located on the right. Now Joe, who happens to own a baseball collectables store, is one of the advertisers whose website is listed in these results.
He has an agreement with Google that makes his ad appear anytime someone searches for the keywords “autographed baseball”. In return, Joe has to pay Google $1.00 anytime someone clicks on his advertisement. Thus the term “Pay-Per-Click”, because the only money Joe ever has to spend on his advertising campaign is when some searches for “autographed baseball”, sees his ad, and then clicks on it, bringing the interested customer to his website.
Now you can probably see why this advertising platform has been so wildly successful with small business owners who are on a tight budget. The search engines are bringing them people who are very interested in their product: they were actually searching for it. They only pay when someone clicks on their ad—someone who is obviously very interested in their product or service.
Pricing for PPC varies on the demand for the keyword or keyword phrase you are bidding on. A non-competitive long keyword phrase may not have any bids at all, which start at $.10. A very competitive single keyword that gets millions of searches per month can get very expensive.
Proper budgeting, with many different ROI (return-on-investment) and conversion factors must be considered before putting money into a PPC campaign. And as with other forms of search marketing, competition is ever increasing and much time must be spent tweaking ads and managing campaigns.
One example of using PPC to promote an album would be to do some keyword research on a similar sounding artist that is more popular or gets a lot of searches in Google.
Say your band has a similar sound to Nirvana, which probably gets all kinds of searches in Google.
You could then set up a budget and bid to rank high for keywords related to Nirvana. The great thing is, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to test the ad to see if it works.Let’s say you spend 50 cents per click on the phrase “nirvana download”. After the ad goes live, let’s say it get’s 100 clicks a day, costing you $50.
Now, the key in figuring out if the ad is working or not is to set proper goals and put a dollar amount on each of them. A simple goal could be getting the visitor to do something, like add themselves to your email address, download a free track, or buy an album.
Let’s say you’re selling an album for ten bucks. You would only need 5 of those 100 visitors to purchase the album in order to break even.
Again, this is a very, VERY simple example of how PPC works, but you get the idea. Their is a lot of research and number crunching involved, and again you have to be smart with the keywords you choose, but it is a very effective form of advertising once you’ve figured out the best and most affordable keyword combinations and write effective ad copy with a website that converts visitors well.
Pay-Per-Click is evolving into other forms of advertising platforms including Pay-Per-Action and Pay-Per-Call.
In the future, as television, radio, and the internet combine into a single outlet for information and entertainment, this advertising model will follow as well, possibly making it the most important advertising development in recent years. By giving small businesses the ability to advertise their products and services alongside large corporate companies, search marketing has created a more level playing field and at the same time increased the complexity and competitiveness of the entire marketing and advertising industry.
Here are a few links to PPC platforms you can use to advertise your website:
And of course, you’re going to need to know the ins and outs of PPC. We’ve already discussed how important keyword research is earlier; use these important PPC resources to learn how to set up your budget, how to write the perfect ad headline and copy, and how to increase conversions once your PPC campaigns go live: