For millions of websites, publishers, and online businesses, search is still the king. While social media may have the media's attention and Twitter and Facebook are garnering a lot of the hype, search still trumps them when it comes to driving traffic and being discovered by potential new customers.

Because of the importance of search traffic to online business, there is an entire industry dedicated to improving websites' visibility in search engine results: Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

SEM is a complex topic that focuses on search engine optimization (SEO), but also includes the use of paid advertising and contextual advertisements in order to bring a website's articles or product pages to the top of search engine result pages (SERPs).

While I could write dozens of articles on the art of search engine marketing and SEO, I'm going to focus on some of the key issues and best practices for optimizing your site for search.

Defining SEM

Before we dig into search engine marketing, it's important to note that not everybody agrees on the definition. This has caused confusion among search professionals for years.

Essentially, there are two ways of defining SEM: either it is an "umbrella" term that encompasses SEO, paid search, contextual advertisements, and paid inclusions, or it only covers paid advertising, inclusions, and search and is separate from SEO.

Organizations such as Forrester Research and the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization believe that SEM is an umbrella term that encompasses both SEO and paid search. For the purposes of this article, I'm using that definition.

Making Your Website SEM-Optimized

Defining SEM is fine, but what matters is this: what simple things can you do to make your website search-optimized?

With help from Chicago-based SEO consultant Carolyn Shelby, currently the Web Experience Manager at the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago, I've come up with a short list of tasks that can quickly boost your website for SEM.

1. Familiarize yourself with SEO: The most important component of search engine marketing is making your site easily discoverable in search results, and that requires a basic understanding of SEO. You don't have to buy a book or take a class on the subject, though: SEOmoz has a fantastic beginner's guide to SEOthat will get you up-to-speed.

2. Grade your website: Hubspot offers a tool called Website Grader, which will provide you with a quick assessment of where your website is optimized for SEM and where it is not.

3. Make the quick fixes: While you could spend months optimizing your website for SEM, make sure to get the little things out of the way first. Focus on what Website Grader says you're lacking (e.g. meta tags, keywords in your title tags, etc.) and then go from there.

4. Use SEM-optimized CMS software and plugins: Unless you're a large company with the money and need to customize every aspect of your website, you're likely using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress,Drupal, or Zen Cart. The good thing about using one of these tools is that they come optimized for search engines.

Do your research: choose software with good SEM features and a plug-in system so you can enhance it. For example, WordPress has the All in One SEO Pack, a great plug-in for optimizing your website. If you run an ecommerce website, Wikipedia has a good comparison of SEO features for different shopping cart software.

5. Test your PPC and landing page strategies: Another major component of search engine marketing is PPC, or Pay Per Click advertising. By putting your ads in search engines, you can drive traffic to your website. Even if you have good SEO and organic search, paid placement still helps. However, that's only half of the story: you need to convert those visitors into customers or regular users.

It's a smart idea to test which keywords and advertisements drive the most traffic (keep track of the stats), and it's just as important to track what happens once those visitors arrive. Google offers tools such as Google Analytics to help you track those visitors and see whether they are staying on your site or bouncing away.

6. Inbound links are still king: This quote from my discussion with Carolyn Shelby really stood out to me:

"I would love to say that the most important thing to get a site to rank well is having superior content, or standards compliant HTML, or even a magic percentage of certain keywords, but I can't. Unfortunately, you can overcome a lot of really basic flaws with any website if you have enough inbound links (with the right anchor text) pointing at the site."

The truth of the matter is that inbound links are still the top way to boost your rankings in search results, so partnering with other websites, asking for links, and creating great content that others want to link to should be your top priority.

This Is Just the Beginning

These tips will only help you get started.  Search engine marketing is a constant process that requires trial-and-error and self-education.  People stay on websites because of great content or great products, but if they can't find it, it's essentially useless. 

I think Carolyn Shelby sums it up perfectly: 

"The most important thing for people to know/remember is that a well optimized site provides a solid foundation for all the other promotion/advertising/marketing efforts you put into building your brand and building your traffic."

reprint from: openforum

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1. Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
2. IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
3. 301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
4. Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
5. Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
6. Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
7. Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
8. Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
9. Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
10. Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
11. Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
12. Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
13. Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
14. Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
15. Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
16. Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
17. New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
18. Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
19. Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
20. Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
21. Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
22. Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
23. Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
24. Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
25. Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
26. Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
27. Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
28. Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
29. Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
30. Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

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