Online Marketing
In the world of Online Marketing, there are three dominant categories: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Social Media Marketing (SMM). At Cascading Media, we strive to create synergy amongst all categories of Online Marketing; maximizing results as applicable to your business objectives.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process which strives to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of select keywords. The foundation to good SEO is keyword research. The goal is to find keywords which meet all the following criteria:
- High relevancy to the promoted product or service.
- Relatively high search volume - meaning people are actively searching for these keywords.
- Relatively low competition - meaning there are a low number of other websites focused on the same keywords.
Implementation of the selected keywords comes in two important flavors: On-site and Off-site optimization. On-site optimization includes all items on the website itself such as:
- Original, useful and relevant content
- Page titles
- H1 tags containing keywords
- Descriptive human readable URLs
- Descriptive ALT tags for images
- Meta page descriptions - the summery appearing in search results
- 301 redirects for non-duplicate content
Off-site Optimization includes all aspects outside of the website which are designed to promote the website. Some examples would include:
- Social Media Networks like Facebook and Twitter promoting website content
- Business listings on Google Places, Bing and Yahoo! Maps
- Directory listings - dmoz.org, local directories, etc.
- Press releases via PRweb.com and/or Marketwire.com
- Relevant inbound links from other websites to yours
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM), otherwise know as Pay-per-Click ads, is a form of Online Marketing which seeks to promote websites in search engines through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all use an auction style of bidding to determine which ads display in relation to specific keywords. Factors such as the Bid, Quality Score, competition, and others come into play when bidding for specific placement in paid search.
Because of the huge search volume Google and it’s partner networks receive (roughly 60-65% of all search traffic), its paid inclusion program called AdWords is the recommended starting point for almost every SEM campaign. These results are then analyzed and refined for other major search engines like Yahoo! and Bing.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations or customer service. Some of the best known social media networks include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Wikipedia.
The concept has three important steps:
- Creating buzz or newsworthy events, videos, tweets, or blog entries that attract attention, and become viral in nature. Buzz is what makes social media marketing work. It replicates a message through user to user contact, rather than the traditional method of purchasing of an ad or promoting a press release.
- Building ways that enable fans of a brand or company to promote a message themselves in multiple online social media venues.
- It is based around online conversations. Social media marketing is not controlled by the organization. Instead it encourages user participation and dialogue.
Social Media isn't just about big networks like Facebook and Twitter, it's about brands having conversations. Cascading Media can help devise a strategy to harness the power of social networks which supports the business objectives of your brand or organization. To learn more, please contact Cascading Media to arrange a no obligation Online Marketing consultation.
