1. Only worry about the top 4 – The most important search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Don’t be fooled by automated programs that submit your site to thousands of search engines, because 94% of all web searches are performed on these top four search sites.  So you might as well concentrate your time and money on these four and not even worry about the rest.
2. Target your search terms – The easiest and the most important goal is to get your site listed when someone searches on the name of your company.  This will help existing customers or people who have been referred by others to find your site.  Of course it is also nice if people find you when they are searching for a product or service that you offer.  This is harder, and how hard depends on how many other sites also want to appear when someone is searching for that product or service.  Generally the less general the search term, the better your chances of getting listed.  For example, if you target the term “house painting”, you will be competing with a lot of other sites in the country, including large sites with a much better chance of appearing high in the results.  If you target the term “house painting bakersville” you will have a better chance of appearing high in the results – and of finding potential customers in your town of Bakersville.
3. Optimize your content – Once you have chosen a few search terms that you want to target (generally called key words), make sure that the content (text) on your site includes these terms.  The first 100 words or so on a page are the most important, so make sure your key words are included there.
4. Format your content – Search engine indexes focus on the content in certain areas of your site.  One of these is the first 100 words on a page, as mentioned above.  Another is the Heading 1 section of the page, indicated by being included between the brackets <H1> and </H1> in the HTML code.  Most HTML Editors and web page building software allows you to highlight some text and designate it as Heading 1.  Make sure you do this for the first bit of text on the page, ideally a headline of some sort, and make sure it includes your most important key words (like your company name).  Other areas where you can add your key words are in the Alt tags for images – the text that appears as a tool tip when you hover over an image.
5. Add title and meta tags – The HTML title tag and meta tags are used by the search engines to generate their index – including the text that appears in your listing in the results.  The title tag appears in the header bar of the site visitor’s browser, and the meta tags are invisible bits of HTML code that don’t appear when someone is looking at your site.  There are a number of meta tags available, but the most important of these is the Description tag (the Keyword tag is generally not used by search engine indexes any longer).  The Title tag should be up to 60 characters long, and the meta Description tag up to 250 characters.  Make sure these include your key words!
6. Focus on your home page – It is possible to get pages other than your home page listed in the search engine results, but unless you have a big site with pages that cover significantly different types of content, it is probably best to focus your energy on your home page.  The number of links to a page make a big difference in the ranking of your site (see next topic), so it is usually most expedient to concentrate on getting links to your home page.
7. Get links to your site – The search engine indexes, especially Google’s, place a lot of emphasis on the number of links pointing to your web site from other web sites to determine your site’s “popularity” – and popularity plays a large part in how high they will rank you.  So do whatever you can to get links to your site from other sites, and the more popular these other sites are, the more they help you.  Good places to get these links are directories such as those on the web sites of your chamber of commerce, trade association, or community web sites.  You can also pay to have your link included in sites such as yellow pages directories.
8. Submit your site – Once you’ve optimized your site’s content for your key words, it is time to submit your site to the search engine indexes.  The most important is Google, which is free and can be found at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.  Another good choice is Inktomi, which you can add for $39 per year at http://www.positiontech.com/inktomi/index.htm.  And lastly, if you can afford it, the Yahoo directory is a good investment for $299 per year at http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add?+Business.
9. Avoid the link spammers – There are a lot of “search engine optimization” companies that will offer to improve your search engine rankings for a fee.  Some of these use “link farms” or “link spamming” to generate a lot of links to your site from pages full of links or from “doorway pages” that redirect to your site.  The goal is to improve the popularity of your site with all of these other links.  This is a risky proposition for two reasons – one is that they are frowned upon by the search engines and they have been known to ban sites that use them from their indexes, and the other is that a lot of the companies that do this for you are “fly by night” operations with less than reputable business practices.  So use caution when considering such an investment.
10. Consider getting assistance – And lastly, a little message from our sponsor. If you need a web site and want to optimize it and submit it to the search engines, consider using a service that will do it for you. The whole process is fairly complex and can be rather daunting, so it may be worth the investment to have someone else do it. 

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1. First consider the top two – The top two search engine advertising services are run by Google and Overture.  Google’s advertising program is called AdWords, and the ads appear in colored boxes to the top and to the right of the search results on their search engine and as sponsored links on the AOL search engine.  Overture does not offer its own search engine, but provides ads to other search engines, the most important being Yahoo and MSN.  Between the two services you will get coverage on over 90% of the searches conducted on the Internet.
2. Then consider the rest – There are a host of other search engine advertising services available.  Most of them have a much more limited reach than Google or Overture, but the ads are usually far less expensive since they are not as popular.  These services include companies such as Business.com, FindWhat, LookSmart, Enhance, Kanoodle, Search123, ePilot, and Lycos InSite.  If you find success with Google and Overture, it may be worth experimenting with some of these others as well.
3. About Google – Google’s AdWords program uses what is essentially a bidding approach to buying ads for certain key words that people may search for.  You do not have to actually bid specific amounts for specific search terms, however.  Instead you set a maximum price that you are willing to pay for a click-through on your ad for a search that contains your key words.  The frequency and position in which Google presents your ad is based on what other advertisers are willing to pay and the available inventory for the key word.  This maximum bid approach combined with the ability to set a daily budget allow you to easily manage the amount you spend without having to invest a lot of time in managing your campaigns, which is an advantage over Overture.  Google’s approach to bidding on general key words rather than specific search terms generally makes them less labor-intensive than an Overture campaign as well.
4. About Overture – Overture uses a bidding approach to buying sponsored links for specific search terms, and you set the maximum price you are willing to pay for a click-through.  You have the ability to see what the other bids are for the search term, so you know exactly what position your ad will appear in.  They also provide the ability to bid on searches that contain key words rather than on specific search terms, but it is far less convenient and effective than Google’s approach.  So in general Overture requires more work to manage your campaign, but in some cases this can be a good thing, and their broad distribution makes them a favorite for all serious search engine marketers.
5. Prepare your list of key words – The first step in getting started with search engine advertising is to prepare a list of key words that relate to the content on your web site.  The idea is to choose words that people are likely to search on when looking for the product, service, or information that is offered on your web site.  If you have a home painting business for example, such a list might include key words such as “home painting”, “house painting”, “residential painting”, “paint house”, “painting company”, etc.  If your business targets a specific geographical area, be sure to include the name of the towns and areas you serve, for example “house painting atlanta”, “home painting atlanta”, etc.  This prevents your ad from showing up when someone searches on “house painting new york”, since paying for a click-through on that term won’t do you any good.  Both Google and Overture, as well as the smaller services, have key word suggestion tools that help you come up with other words related to ones that you can think of.
6. Prepare your ad content – Obviously the content of your ad will have a huge impact on whether a searcher is likely to click on it to go to your site.  It is important to give this careful consideration, and whenever possible include the key words you are bidding on in the headline and/or description of your ad.  The lengths of the headline and description varies for each service, so you will need to develop content for each service you are using.  Overture and Google each offer helpful advice on developing your ad content, so you should read this before you get started.
7. Measure your campaign performance – It is important to track the success of your campaigns so you know what kind of return you are getting on your investment.  Google and Overture both provide statistics on the number of impressions (how many times your ad is shown) and number of click-throughs for your ads.  It is a good idea to analyze these occasionally to measure the effectiveness of the various key words you are bidding on so that you can improve or remove the poorly performing ones.  You can also use tracking URL’s so that you can analyze it with your own web log analysis software if you have it.
8. Use conversion tools – Both Google and Overture offer conversion measurement tools that you can use to take your analysis a step beyond simple click-throughs.  These tools generate HTML code for you to paste on pages on your web site that only users who complete a desired process will see (such as buying something, signing up for something, etc.).  This allows you to measure how many people actually “convert” into a customer or lead, which is ultimately more important than how many simply view your site.
9. Experiment with content matching – Both Google and Overture allow you to show your ads on web sites that offer content related to your key words.  This provides additional distribution for your ad beyond the search engine results pages where their standard services appears.  You may find the performance for these ads is less than that for ads appearing in front of people who are actively searching, but it still may be a profitable way to attract visitors to your site, so it is probably worth experimenting with if your search campaigns are successful.
10. Stay on top of it – Successful search engine advertising requires an investment in time to keep your campaigns performing well.  You need to monitor your results and adjust your campaigns accordingly. And especially with Overture, you will need to constantly adjust your bid amounts since your position is always changing based on the activity of other advertisers.

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