Search Engine Marketing - Can Search Engine Marketing Really Help My Business?

There are over 74,000 internet connected households in Ireland, with over 2 million users – over half the population is online.  Europe has over 400 million and the world will see over 2 billion internet users by the end of 2009.   That is the population of China, which many major corporations consider to be the golden egg of international marketing.  But how is your business going to benefit from any of these customers if they can’t find you?  Search engine marketing is more critical for a successful business than ever before. If your customers can’t find you, you don’t have any customers.Last year it is estimated over 90% of internet users used search engines when looking for a product or service.  They may not have used it every time, but if 90% of 2 million people used it even once, that’s 1.8million people looking online for products and services to buy.  The reason so many people are turning to the internet to find the products and services they want (even if they are not going to shop online) is because searching the internet is easy.  Many local businesses have websites, even when they don’t offer online sales.  So, by using the internet, customers can shop, compare and locate the information they need without leaving their home.  However, only the businesses which appear in the search results end up getting the business. Effective search engine marketing is important to ensuring your business is the one customers find.Search engines are getting smarter.  It used to be you could just load your website with the words you think related to your business and search engines would rank websites on how many times these words appeared (or were hidden) on your site.  That is no longer true.  Search engines are smart enough to know when a word is being used contextually. If you’re just adding the same word or similar words to your text over and over again the search engines will throw out any references to this keyword and your site.  If you attempt to build traffic by simple keyword loading you’re actually doing yourself more harm than good and your search engine optimization is failing.With all the potential customers out there, both locally and globally, effective search engine marketing is critical in bringing your business to their attention. Optimise your site for higher search engine ranking.