Search engine marketing (SEM) helps you to get more business from your Web site. However SEM usually involves Pay Per Click advertising, which is expensive in competitive areas. What if you didn't need to rely on expensive PPC advertising campaigns for excellent search engine marketing results?

If you're relying on PPC and other advertising to bring traffic to your site, you're missing out. You can use the search engines to bring you completely free, targeted organic traffic. This search engine marketing strategy not only saves you big money, but also saves you time as well, because you don't have to monitor your SEM every day.

The biggest benefit of these four steps of free SEM is not only that they're free, but also that they keep giving you a return over time, unlike advertising, because the money that you spend on advertising is gone for good.

Let's get started.

Step 1. Develop your keywords collection

Search engine marketing starts with good collections of keywords. The keyword collections that brings you targeted traffic will boost your business inexpensively every day for months and years to come.

Your keyword collections should include these groups:

* Your brand keywords. These are the keywords which are specific to your business, including your business name, your tagline (slogan or motto), and the names of your products;

* Your product/ service keywords. This group includes the keywords for all your products. This list is small, and should be consistent with your Web site's structure;

* Your primary keyword group. This group covers all the terms and words that your customers use to find you and your products. For example, if you're selling women's clothing, then you'll need to add all the generic women's clothing terms. Although these generic terms won't give you sales directly, they help the search engines to categorize your Web site;

* Your keyword phrases group. The phrases are three or four word terms that people use to reach your site. The best way to build a list of these phrases is to search your referrer logs for the phrases that people are using to find you.

Step 2. Create content using your keywords

The search engines are indexers. This means that your keywords need to be on your site. Remember however that you're creating keyword-rich content for your site's visitors and sales conversions, as well as for the search engines. Ensure that all the content on your site is not only readable, but is also informative: the search engines (led by Google) are beginning to penalize obvious "highly optimized" content. (This is content that's obviously written for the search engines, rather than for people.)

Step 3. Enhance your web site with landing page development

From the search engines' point of view, you don't have a site, as such. You have a collection of pages, and each page is an entry point AND a destination. Therefore, you should look at every page on your site as not only a doorway for your site visitors, but as a pathway down which you can guide them.

In a sense, every page of your site is a "landing page". Usually a landing page is a page that a surfer reaches by clicking on an advertisement. However, in your search engine marketing efforts, you're not paying for advertising; your site's visitors are finding you through organic search, by entering a search query. Although this traffic is "free" you want your site visitors to do something -- ultimately to buy from you if you're selling products and services.

Therefore you need to construct every page so that you optimize your marketing results. Each page should lead your visitor onward to a response, or get a response right on the page. Look at each page with a visitor-action mindset: make it clear what you want your visitor to do: visit another page, ask for more information, buy, sign up for your mailing list -- ASK for ACTIONS.

Step 4. Analyze your referring links

Your site's referring links are a gold mine. They tell you how your visitors arrived at your site. If they arrive via a search engine, you'll see exactly which terms the visitor typed into a search engine query box to find you.

Study your referrers at least once a week, and make a list of all the search terms. You'll find treasures that you wouldn't anticipate. Use these nuggets of information. Create content around the nuggets which offers information and which asks for actions.

There you have it: four easy steps to free search engine marketing. Although these steps take time to set up, they will repay you a thousand times over the years for the time you spend.

Copyright 2006 Angela Booth