Almost everybody who knows anything about online marketing knows the importance of search engines – especially Google. In fact Google has become so dominant it is almost impossible to talk about the internet without immediately discussing the role of Google.

The process of systematically trying to get the search engines to drive (“free” not paid) traffic to your website(s) is called Search Engine Marketing. SEM, as it is often rererred to, involves different ways of trying to influence search engines – especially Google – to give you high ranking for searches done on your most important keywords.

For example, if your most important keywords are “Toledo Real Estate”, SEM involves trying to get high ranking in Google searches for the phrase “Toledo Real Estate”. This way people will click on your link in the Google search results and be taken to your blog or website.

Voila. Traffic.

The two most important techniques used in SEM are

• “Optimizing” your content for specific keywords. This is usually called SEO – short for search engine optimization. SEO involves choosing the most promising keywords, and then making sure those keywords show up in your web content in the most important places.

• Link building. Getting links from other sites pointing to your content is a good way to get the attention of the search engines. They consider inbound links as “votes” by other online bloggers and publishers that your content is worth looking at.

Generally speaking, the more your content focuses on your primary keywords, and the more inbound links you have, the better your website or blog will rank in the search engines.

But there are problems with SEM…

• It is indirect. You are relying on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to determine who is or is not a good candidate to visit your site or blog. This can be a very frustrating experience – especially when you are in a competitive market.

• It takes a lot of time and effort (usually) to influence the search engines. Typically you will have to wait at least three months to see any lasting results from SEM and SEO.
• It is unpredictable. We have seen clients rise to #1 for their search terms, and we have seen other clients drop off the map. It is hard to know if this is ever the direct result of a concerted SEM/SEO effort. You do your best to give Google and Bing what they want, but you just don’t know for sure it is going to work.

SEM is just one part of the marketing puzzle

SEM is a valuable long term strategy which every serious online marketer should adopt. But don’t count on immediate results. Eventually as your blog gains credibility you will consistently draw traffic from the search engines. But it can often be a very long and tedious process.

Even more important, SEM will only take you so far. It is what we call a “passive” method of marketing. It is like Social Networking in this regard. Social networking – being active in Facebook, for example – will introduce you to many new “friends” and prospects. But it will generally not do much direct selling for you.

For example, if you own a restaurant and you want to run a one week lunch special, SEM will be almost useless. To generate traffic to your offer page you will need other promotional techniques. These will be discussed in future posts.

In a blog post from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog called Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty”, Google staffer Susan Moskwa tries to set the record straight. She says,

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

To make a long story short, Google is not opposed to you publishing content found elsewhere, as long as you are not trying to manipulate search results. They just won’t feature multiple instances of the same text in their search results.

For example, if you publish an original article word for word in three different places, they will not list all three of those instances in their search results. Usually just one. You might consider this a penalty (that content not being listed in search results), but it is not a penalty in the sense that such content will degrade your entire website. At least that is how interpret this explanation.

What Google wants to feature in their SERPS is content that adds something unique to searchers. In another Google blog post the staffer says “During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information.”

In a response to a comment on the same Google blog mentioned above, Susan Moskwa goes on to say about duplicate content, “…remember that, if you are providing content that a) you didn’t generate, and b) is available elsewhere, it’s important to add some sort of value of your own.”

So if you are republishing material and you care about search results, it is important to add some unique content to make it distinctive from other instances.

Just exactly how much “unique content” is an important and difficult question. In another response to a very insightful question about templated or syndicated content, Susan M says, “When in doubt, I’d do what makes most sense from a user perspective (what is most helpful to human visitors).”

Content for humans – This is an important point for people trying to do SEO to understand. When discussing these endless search engine optimization concerns it is easy to forget that your content should first and foremost be for the benefit of your actual readers – people, not computers.

In my estimation this means if you latch onto a piece of syndicated content that you feel will have value for your readers, you should go ahead and publish it.

For example, if you want to embed a Youtube video go ahead and do it if you think your readers will find it interesting.

It’s just that according to the above Google suggestions, the chances are that post will not show up in searches. Unless, of course, you add unique features to it: a unique title, a unique description, unique tags, or a unique review or commentary.

At the same time, that is not to say a bald “duplicated” video running on your site will detract from the search engine performance of the site as a whole. It just won’t help it very much.

Traffic from other sources – You should also remember when considering this issue that search engines are not the only source of valuable traffic.

In fact the traffic gained from Google or Bing may be quite difficult to get and spending all your efforts on conforming to their constraints may preclude you from getting traffic from other equally or more valuable sources.

Some of these sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, ActiveRain, other social networks, affiliate networks, JV networks and things such as email campaigns may be much easier to take advantage of and probably much quicker to implement than the long hard grind involved in getting search engine traffic.

Getting that type of traffic may in fact involve duplicating certain types of content in lots of different places – places where you drive eyeballs using methods other than search engines.

As always the first rule should be: “Give your readers something interesting and valuable.” Readers first, search engines second. Unfortunately many of us have been swept up in the search engine game and have our priorities turned around backwards.

Here’s how the BlogEasy SuperLink program works – This is a program to help build inbound links to your blog(s).

1. Every time you publish 10 BlogEasy articles we will give you one SuperLink credit.

2. For every SuperLink credit we will create a special SuperLink article that will be posted only on your blog. Or we can use a recently published post of your own as a SuperLink post.

3. Then we will create a synopsis of that SuperLink post with a link pointing to your site and make that synopsis available to our members in the BlogEasy article list.

Can you see the potential here? Publishing BlogEasy posts not only gives you high quality relevant content, but it is an awesome way to build inbound links from just the kind of sites the search engines consider the most important – other active real estate sites.

Go ahead. Sign up for the free 5 day BlogEasy trial right now**

So that makes Local Search very important for businesses targeting a local market. Real estate agents are obviously one of the most important business segments who should be up to speed on local business search.

Google’s local business search strategy is based on Google Maps. When you think of it, this is probably Google’s most important potential revenue source for Google Maps. As GMaps based local search becomes more dominant, it will become an important source of ad revenue.

If you use Google Maps to do a search you are using their local search system. For example, I did a search for “Waterloo Realtors” from Google.com (not the toolbar), and this is what I got:

Notice that the sponsored (paid) links are at the very top. But right under those are the “local business results”. This is what we’re talking about here. Google has elevated the importance of local search results so that, for location based searches, they come up ahead of the normal results we are used to.

The bottom line is that if you want to score well for location based searches you have to get into the local search game.

There is some helpful information at the link below describing how to get started…

Getting Listed in Google Local Business Center