SEM DIY – Do You Have What It Takes?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

This might sound like a funny question but often time’s people really don’t understand what it truly takes on a daily basis to market a company online. The days of writing a press release and an article and sitting back are long gone and with the frequency of new content and material finding its way into the lighting quick search space it really takes a daily effort coupled with intense multi-tasking skills to really get any name out there. Search engine marketing in today’s marketplace calls for daily activities and efforts.

Let’s discuss what you would need to know attempting your own search engine marketing:

On-Site Search Engine Optimization
If you do not have any knowledge regarding keyword research this will be your first step. Optimizing a website is something like a craft and over time your skills will sharpen. The first time around you might be too aggressive and push the boundaries or not aggressive enough. You will first have to learn how to successfully conduct keyword research. You will need to understand just how to step into the shoes of your audience in order to anticipate what types of keywords they might be using to find your similar products or services. Depending on your industry you could very well come up thousands of keywords that you will have to scrub and clean up in order to remove anything that doesn’t belong.

Once this is done you have to go page by page throughout your entire website and target specific keywords for specific pages writing out very tasteful URL structures, meta information and all existing content. Over time you figure out exactly how this should look but if you are just starting off you will want to make sure you get this done right otherwise you could miss out on very valuable traffic.

External Marketing (Link Building)
Link building is something you are never going to stop doing but before you even start you will have to put together some sort of plan. Shooting from the hip every month is just not going to cut it and you have to put together some sort of outline prior to starting so you can track your progress. If you are in an industry that already has a lot going on don’t be surprised if you find yourself putting in some serious man hours to really gain some of those great links you are looking for.

Link building is one of the largest driving forces to increasing rankings and overall branding power in the search engine. In a competitive market or space it will require almost daily efforts to really execute the link building step properly. If you do not have the industry knowledge on how you should properly go about link building your website you could end up link building the wrong way and generate a penalty to your website.

Since link building is never ending and an ongoing process you will need to educate yourself on all new upcoming trends and techniques used by industry professionals.

Social Media Marketing
Social media is something that will be required on a daily basis. If you are in a moderately competitive space it will require even more daily interaction with your audience. Social media marketing has changed the landscape of online marketing for ever. It is an area that went from being a pleasure to a necessity for all businesses. It doesn’t matter if you are a candlestick maker or a hosting company your audience is hanging out on the pages of Twitter, Facebook and more looking to strike up some sort of conversation with you.

Social media marketing requires getting onto these platforms on a daily basis and either striking up conversations or simply responding to inquiries. Writing in a company blog is also a part of social media that also overlaps the search engine optimization space so you cannot neglect this area of marketing. A blog will give you very valuable leverage in the social communities you just have to take the time every week to write. A blog that is not frequently updated can lead to a loss of business and branding so ideally that blog would be updated at least once per/week.

Starting the process of doing your own marketing can get very time consuming so you have to understand what you are getting into when you get going. It is a daily effort that cannot fall by the waist side otherwise it will never sprout like you want it to.