Super Search Engine Marketing

Google is constantly making new tools available to not only the webmaster, but also to the user. In this posting I will focus on the tools to the webmaster, in another i will cover the user.

Among the tools for websites are:

- Webmaster tools – while these do not give hard core information they do provide an insight to a number of aspects to your site.  Key words, Links google has determined are important to your site, and to a lesser trusted degree the number of backlinks and the anchor text associate with them.  The last I consider to be more important.  While webmaster will never give you a look at all your backlinks it is certainly going to give you the ones google considers the most authority links.

- Google analytics – This is a way to measure the metrics to your site.  It will tell you how people are finding you from links from other sites to key words that people are using to find your sites content.  It also shows Google that your willing to share information about the traffic to you site and how people view your site.  Powerful data your turning over to a search engine and it will IMHO pay attention.

- Google Adsense and Adwords – while I do not recommend adwords campaigns for searches, as you can go broke real fast.  Campaigns on the Adsense content network will give you some impressions and also backlinks from sites that are content related. Adsense and allowing Adwords to appear on your site indicate a couple things.  First to google that you serious about making money, and you will make some, the second and more important is that it shows your customers that you KNOW your the BEST cause your not worried about the “competitors” and show that you know your product is best.  Think about the effect on customers if you walked into a store and there were ads for competitors?  What would you think?  You would be astounded right?

- Google Search – this allows people from your website to either search your site or to search google. Again you will make some revenue from it but more important like Adwords and Adsense and customers that your not afraid and your serious about making money.

- Google Alerts – these allow you to set up alerts for keywords and monitor activity on the net based on these keyword alerts.  While these are really only valuable if your watching your competitors again the more of googles tools you use the more I am convinced google will like you.

- Google Base or Merchant Center – these are great tools to show google your serious about your site.  Even submitting a small feed, updating it regularly shows google you want search results and your willing to go that extra mile to get them even if it means creating an XML file to submit to them.

- Google Docs – this is one you have to be careful with.  First cause your making possibly sensitive company data available for google to index and let loose in search results.  On the other hand, stuff you want google to index, along with links to your site, then this is a perfect tool to share more data about your site to google.

- Local Business Center – in my mind this is again something very powerful to google.  Not many people take advantage of it, but for certain keywords it again shows google your willing to use their tools to help customers to find your site.

- Gmail – this can be very powerful if you use it to send out emails to your mailing list.  Google already admits that it is scanning emails for links, the more links or times it sees your site being sent the more likely your going to get better results.

There are many more google tools that you can use and I will explain them in future posts as we delve into how the master data miner in the world is using that data to help sites rank better.

Sparky

One of the hot new things is the Social Networking sites like Myspace and Facebook. These are also excellent ways to advertise your site, you just have to be creative in how you go about it.

First is to create graphics and things that people can use as comments or layouts on their page.  In the graphic and other elements you use to make it easy for people to use your site to get comments, you put in things that bring people to your site.

Creating comment Graphics is much easier and it can also show off your product or services.  I run a site called You Sexy Thang which sells sexy clothing for men and women.  Part of the site is obviously pictures of the various products, so I have taken some of the pictures added some text and then saved them in a different location on my site so that they are seperate from the product pictures.  Then create a page with the code that people need and Bingo ready made comments with links to my site.

This creates several things that will benefit your site. First it brings people into your site when people click on the image to look for reply comments and while there maybe buy something.  Second, It also creates inbound links with proper tags that eventually the SE’s will find and thus it adds one-way links to your site which should increase your PR and SERP.

This is a fun and interesting way to promote your site and your products.

Sparky