Search Engine Marketing – 5 Essential Facts No One Tells You

Are you taking your first steps into search engine marketing? While SEO (search engine optimization) and other strategies are easy to understand, they’re by no means simple in practice. Here are five essential facts you must know for success.

1. You Optimize One Page at a Time
Just as Google and the other search engines deliver one page at a time in response to queries, so you optimize your site’s pages one page at a time. Both on-page and off-page factors are important, if you want to hit the one of the top ten spots on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

2. Optimization Never Ends
Just as no Web site is ever complete, it’s vital to realize that in search engine marketing, your optimization of site pages never ends. Just as you’re working on your campaigns, so is everyone else. You may achieve # 1 rankings today, tomorrow you could be at # 999, or vanish from the results altogether.

3. Make Haste Slowly: Expect Results in Three Months
When you’re working with the organic search engine results, it’s a slow process. You won’t see the results of your work for some weeks; often you won’t see the results until three months have passed.

Frustrating? No, because once you understand that all your work is cumulative, and that the potential rewards are great, you’ll develop patience.

4. SEO May Be a Waste of Time for Your Site
SEO isn’t the answer for every site. It’s vital that you understand your audience, and their buying patterns. If your site’s audience isn’t using the search engines, don’t waste your time with search engine marketing.

5. Traffic (Usually) Isn’t the Answer
Increased sales from your site often won’t be the result of increases in traffic. All your site’s visitors are not equal. It’s better to have 100 visitors of whom 20 buy, than 5,000 visitors with no sales at all.

To increase your sales, find out where your buyers are coming from, and what impacts their buying decision. Chasing traffic can be a blind alley and a waste of money.

So there you have five essential facts of search engine marketing you must know for success with your site.