SEM Not SEO: Marketing not Optimisation for Success

SEO is Dead – Long Live SEM

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of optimising a website for the search engines. Many web designers still this works. It hasn't worked for about five years!

So what was SEO? It involved many aspects of design. First, was designing a navigation structure that was logical, and which had no more than three levels unless vital. three levels means:

Next, you put keywords into the title tag, description tag and keyword tag. Many designers would put all the keywords related to every page on the site in the keyword tag for every page. This was always bad practice, so it is no surprise that Google now ignores the keyword tag. The description tag, which might also be stuffed with keywords, but in something like a sentence, was also taken into consideration. Nowadays, it is the text the searcher sees about your site, so it needs to be user friendly. In fact, it needs to attract humans.

Then, there were alt tags, which are tags attached to each image, and were supposed to describe what it was about. It was intended for people using computers with very slow internet connection, so they could see what the image was about rather than the image itself. Up to about five or six years ago, so-called SEO experts were stuffing alt tags with keywords, and of course, their clients' sites stayed at the bottom of the pack.

Then, you probably put a list of the services or products you offered at the bottom of the page. This was often done in a spammy way, but it can be done successfully.

Then, you made sure that there were some keywords in each page, related to the primary and secondary keywords in the article. In those days, the amount was 2-3%. That is still valid, the the number of times the keyword is mentioned is 1-2% for the main keyword and half as many for the secondary keyword if there is one.

So this is SEO that is dead. It won't get your site ranked in the search engines except for very obscure keywords with literally zero competition. Believe it or not, but a keyword for which there is no competition, meaning that you can't find any, will have competition from sites which are very competitive in SEM.

However, it is still a good idea to have a keyword in the title tag, and your site needs a good navigation structure. Following Google Panda, it also needs more pages than before; about ten pages is what a business website needs as a minimum. Some of these should be of general interest.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

SEM is about building links to your sites. Again, in the early days you could get a good ranking with reciprocal links, especially between sites of similar content. For example, your website about model aircraft could exchange links with a website about model aeroplanes, similar, but not competing with each other.

Reciprocal links now have no value. Then, you can build links in a three-way ring. This time, website A builds a link to B, B builds a link to C, and C builds a link to A. Sometimes these rings can include five or more sites, but that needs quite a bit of management. Also, Google does have ways of tracing links, so these are of less value than in the past.

Another ruse was to get links from US universities, which have domains ending in .edu. In fact, one of the students' unions spoiled this by selling links, at high prices to webmasters, then other students' unions followed suit. Then, Google rumbled it, and downgraded these sites! And that is what happens when you do some linking that is a bit underhand.

Google likes to think that the best ranked sites have obtained their links naturally, so they frown on anything unnatural. The good SE marketer knows how to get these links and how to build more. That takes experience and knowledge.

SEM consists in building links in one direction only; to your site. This is a complex operation as you need links of different types. For example, secondary directories provide useful links, as do networking sites, Web 2.0 sites, blogs, comments on blogs, articles in article directories and on other sites, and links from websites with good Page Rank.

Secondary directories are of the least value of these, but it pays to have your site in some. See our article on directories. However, the most value comes from websites and blogs that have good rankings and good Page Rank themselves.

We have almost four years experience of successfully building links for our clients in the UK and Ireland, and are able to organise campaigns for businesses anywhere. We specialise in providing this service to offline businesses,and our aim all the time is to get more potential clients to their sites. This is more important than gaining high rankings as such.

If you are interested in our services, give us a call or contact us – details on Contact Us