Search Engine Marketing Shelly Brown Director of Web Services Southwest Baptist University.

Search Engine Marketing

Shelly BrownDirector of Web Services

Southwest Baptist University

Just the facts, Ma’am.• Approximately 4 billion web sites on

www• 300 million people online across the

world and 150 million in North American homes.

• Majority of users rely on search engines to find related websites

• Only 7-10 percent of users look past the first three pages of search results.

*Statistics from Nielson’s Net Rating Service

Marketing your sitethrough search engines

• “organic” traffic – via Search Engine Optimization

• paid advertising

Types of search engines

• Web crawlers– Google

• Metacrawlers– Dogpile

• Directories– Yahoo Directory

Top Search Engines

1. Google 44.85%

2. Yahoo Search 32.023. MSN Search 25.184. AOL Search 17.005. Ask Jeeves 7.806. Information.com 7.697. Overture 3.838. Netscape Search 3.069. InfoSpace Web Search 2.8610. Microsoft Search 2.86

*According to Nielsen/NetRatings 12/04

The Goal

• Reach our target market– High page rank 1-10 scale,

• 6 = very common (SBU)• 7-8 range is good (CNN)• MSN = 9• Google = 10

– On the first page of results– Within “golden triangle” on search

results page

The Golden Triangle

The joint study conducted by search marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it and eye tracking firm Eyetools examined the eye movements of users viewing Google search result pages.

The Golden Triangle

How does Google work?

• Mechanized search engine that uses robots to crawl the web

• PageRank measures importance of web pages based on votes

• Hypertext-Matching analysis

Getting listed on Google

• Organic traffic –Search Engine Optimization

• Sponsored links

• Submit URL– http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

• University Search– What’s the secret?

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

1. Titles– Your pages should be titled from

specific to general. For example: • <Title>Women’s Tennis Team at

Southwest Baptist University</Title>

Top Ten Strategies for Optimization

2. Inbound Links– Links to your site from other high-ranked

Web sites will increase your “vote” as an important page, thus improving your ranking.

– This is the single biggest factor for determining which sites appear on Google

– Not sure who is linked to your site? In Google’s search box type “link:” followed by your URL. For example, link:www.sbuniv.edu.


3. Limit dynamically generated pages– Google limits the number of dynamic

pages they index. Their web crawler can sometimes crash sites with dynamic content.


4. Visit competitor’s Web sites with high rankings.– What are they doing to achieve a high

page rank?


5. Avoid Frames– Frames do not fit the normal format of

the web: Each URL corresponds to one page.


6. Internal Link Structure– Internal link structure should provide a

path to every page.


7. Don’t try to spam Google’s web crawlers– Could result in your Web site being

permanently removed from Google’s index.


8. Focus on target keywords– Concentrate on improving your search

engine results based on what keywords your audience might use:

• Keyword=Baptist University• Results=#9 on search results list

• Keyword=Christian College• Results=Not within the first 30 pages



9. Install Google’s free Toolbar– The Google Toolbar will display the page

rank of each page you visit, including your own.

– http://toolbar.google.com/

http://toolbar.google.com/

10. Meta Tags– <meta name="description"

content="Southwest Baptist University is located in Bolivar, Missouri. Southwest Baptist University is a Christ-centered, caring academic community preparing students to be servant leaders in a global society.">

– <meta name="keywords" content="SBU, Bearcats, Christian, college, Baptist, University, Missouri, Bolivar, Christ, academic, degree, four-year, school">


Useful Links

• Hard copy of presentation:http://www.sbuniv.edu/SEMarketing.ppt

• Google Webmaster Info:http://www.google.com/webmasters/

• Search Engine Watchhttp://www.searchenginewatch.com/

• My email: [email protected]

http://www.sbuniv.edu/SEMarketing.ppt

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

Search Engine Marketing Shelly Brown Director of Web Services Southwest Baptist University.

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