Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Search Engine Optimization is an important marketing strategy because it can deliver inexpensive targeted leads. It's a long term process where a company will attempt to create a site that is viewed by the search engines as the authoritative source for that term and will be displayed first.
Over time, a company active in SEO marketing will determine which phrases result in the highest conversion. For truly valuable phrases, it's often not enough to claim the top spot. Instead, the company will work to box out their competitors on the first page. In other words, the company will promote additional pages so that they will also be listed on the first page causing others to be pushed to page 2. Since search engines will only list 1-2 pages per domain per search, the company would need to have other domains that are relevant to that keyword phrase. This doesn't have to always be their domain. They might have a listing in a directory, a page on another site such as Squidoo or Wikipedia, or an article on somebody else's site.
For a while, people used sub-domains to box out their competitors, but there's talk that the search engines are going to start looking at sub-domains as folders, which limits it down to the 1-2 links per search. Because of this, the only reliable method is to promote pages on several sites.
The more you own a keyword phrase, the better. Repetition is a powerful selling tool. The more somebody sees references to a particular business related to what they're looking for, the more credible that company becomes in their mind.
