Internet Marketing Course BLOG

Source: SEMPO

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): A leading US SEM organization has just released it’s 2005 Search Engine Marketing report. It includes all forms of SEM – search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine advertising. The growth in this space continues at a breakneck pace, still dominated by Google and Yahoo!.

“Advertisers in the U.S. and Canada spent $5.75 billion on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in 2005, a 44 percent increase over 2004 spending, according to a report released today by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), a non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide.

The report, “The State of Search Engine Marketing 2005,” also projects that SEM spending in North America will reach $11 billion in 2010. The annual totals include payments to search engines and search-related media companies, search engine marketing agencies and in-house expenditures in support of such programs. The programs include paid placement, paid inclusion, organic search engine optimization and search engine marketing technology platforms.”

Read the full press release at:
The State of Search Engine Marketing (SEMPO)

Technorati Tags: Business, Internet, Marketing

By Jennifer Laycock
Search Engine Guide

Dave’s Comments (Internet Marketing Course Blog): Jennifer outlines a no nonsense, down-to-earth way for small businesses to get started with, and then to get the most out of their search engine marketing efforts.

“One of the most common reasons that I hear small business owners give about why they are not undertaking search engine marketing is that it’s too much work and it costs too much money. While there’s no arguing that both time and money are involved in proper search engine marketing, many companies overlook the fact that a little bit of time and a lot of perseverance can have just as much of an impact as a lot of work up front.

The “take-your-time” approach to search engine marketing can work whether you want to take on your search marketing in-house, or even if you want to farm it out to a specialist. Here’s how it works.

Farming it out to Professional Search Marketers

While many search marketing firms prefer to do all of the optimization work for a client up front and then charge a maintainence fee for keeping an eye on the listings, there are some that are willing to be more flexible with their offerings. Some SEM firms are more than happy to take on a client on a retainer basis. The idea behind a retainer is that you are paying the company to work on your site for a certain number of hours each month. A retainer deal for organic optimization on a small site may break down like this:

1 hour a month of keyword research
2 hours a month of copywriting/editing
2 hours a month of code changing/page building
2 hours a month of link building
——————————————————————–
7 hours a month of search marketing at anywhere from $50 – $250 an hour = $350 – $1650 a month

This type of retainer deal should get you a couple of pages of new content each month, each targeting one or two keyword phrases. It should also get you some ongoing link building, which will have a cumulative effect on helping your site rank better. The real benefit of this method is that it lets you start seeing results before you have committed a large amount of money, a true blessing for business owners that just aren’t sure about how well search marketing will work for them.”

Read the entire article by clicking on the following link:
http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/004860.html

by Dave Ingalls
Internet Marketing Course Blog
May 31, 2005

Reciprocal Linking has been a particulary important element of Search Engine Optimization since the rise of Google. As you can review on my Linking Strategies Web page, reciprocal linking is a mechanism you can use to create inbound text links pointing to your Web site from other Web sites containing content relevant to yours. This is accomplished by offering to provide a (reciprocal) link back to those Web sites that link to you.

Another way to achieve the same goal, and if done properly, potentially outperform traditional reciprocal linking programs, is to buy inbound text links to your Web site from other Web sites with content relevant to yours. This form of linking, dubbed text link buying, has been around a long time, but it has recently picked up momentum because of the value these links can have to Google search rankings, and the emergence of “text link brokers”.

Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads, Inc., has authored an excellent overview of this subject titled, “The Definitive Guide to Link Buying”. Click on the link below to download/save this very informative guide:

http://text-link-ads.com/link-buying-guide.pdf

I urge you to download and read this guide. In 30 minutes, you’ll be an expert in text link buying – well, at least you’ll know what you’re doing when you go looking for text links to buy!