The success of your search engine marketing drive depends heavily on how successful you have been with your keyword research. However, your job doesn’t finish once your have researched for the appropriate keywords and listed them. You should also be able to use the results that such a research work has offered.

Keywords are the lifeline of any search engine marketing drive. You will not be able to sustain your online presence unless proper support is given by the keywords. As the choice of correct keywords will bring traffic to your website, you need to research and come up with those keywords that relate to your products/services. Otherwise, your website will not serve any purpose as nobody will visit it.

Choosing the appropriate keywords will help your site get indexed by the search engines in a favorable manner and your site “may” get good search engine rankings for those keywords. Why I am stressing on “may” is that there are many other factors that determine a good rank apart from the keywords. However to get the best results you should use the keywords in your:

•  site domain (…if possible. Of course if the domain is already booked or the site online, there isn’t much you can do about it.)
•  site’s page titles and headlines (very important)
•  content (important)
•  links, both internal and external (…using keywords in anchor text is important)
•  marketing newsletters and online press releases
•  meta tags, and
•  image alt tags

The following steps will help you to conduct keyword research in an effective manner:

Use Research Tools:  Though there are various tools that will help you to conduct keyword research, some of the most trusted ones are Wordtracker, Google’s Keyword Tool and the tool on Aaron Wall’s site named seobook.com. Using a combination of paid and free tools for keyword research could be a better choice as they can give you a wide range of keywords to research on.

Still, if you are starter and have a shoe-string budget, Google Keyword Suggestion Tool is one of the best available online and its free. Try it.

Wordtracker too has a free version available online, but has some limitations. You can try it here.

Get Specific:  Target specific phrases that people are likely to use while searching for your products/services. Remember that web surfers usually use key phrases that are a bunch of two or three words when they search for certain things online. Compared to the single keywords, these key phrases are less generic and can be easily targeted for your search engine marketing purposes.

For example “real estate” may not be a good keyword to optimize for your site. One its too competitive, two it may get visitors from places that you may not be interested in. However “Real Estate in Minneapolis” is a better keyword if your business is primarily focused in offering real estate services in Minneapolis.

Don’t Depend on Numbers:  Don’t believe the number of monthly searches for a particular keyword blindly. Though you should consider this data, pay more concentration to how a specific search phrase fares in terms of relative popularity. You should ensure that enough people will use that keyword when they think of your niche. If not, it won’t be worth your money, time and effort to target these search phrases.

Use Highly Relevant Terms:  As explained above, make sure that your keywords are highly relevant to help you achieve your final objective. If you are selling products or offering a service online, those keywords should be selected that call for an action – be it purchasing the product or ordering the service. Other objectives like getting subscriptions to newsletter and content publications will need more careful planning.

Learn From Your Competitors:  After short-listing of probable keywords, use them to search for competitors. Visit some of the top listed sites and see how their web pages are optimized for particular keywords. This will help you to plan better.

Keep these suggestions in mind in order to reap the most of your keyword research and search engine marketing campaign.

When you promote your website or business using social media channels, the procedure is called Social media marketing. You can attract the attention of people, get links for your site and drive traffic to it – all via social media marketing. 

Usually, there are 5 major categories of social media marketing:

•  Self declaration: You can use the “About Us” section of your site or create online profiles (say, at MySpace) declaring your business, the values and vision, contact details etc. Though this form of interaction is somewhat one-sided, it can help you a bit in the marketplace.

•  Interaction via associations: You can interact with your customers via social networking (like StumbleUpon, del.icio.us etc.) and social bookmarking sites (such as Furl, Reddit, BlinkList etc.).

•  Interaction started by your users: It’s the turn of your users to offer their feedback and your chance to reply. Various forums, message boards, community sites and “groups” like Google Groups, AOL Groups, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Groups etc. belong to this category.

•  Interaction started by you: When you initiate a dialog as a provider with your customers, it can give you an insight on several aspects of your business. Ask your customers to share their opinion about your products /services, what they love about it and what’s the thing that they hate. Their feedback will help you to fine tune your products and even help you to plan the launch of some new products or services. 

•  Face-to-face interaction: Yes, it’s the oldest but the safest bet. Nothing can come close to talking in person. So, organize a gathering of your customers, talk to them, let them talk to one another and build a strong community.

So, whatever be the mode of your social media marketing, it’s worth a try because it is:

•  free or costs just a small amount
•  spans the world and grows fast
•  interactive
•  formed and developed by the user
•  even for people with no technical knowledge
•  where the future of the Internet is

Are you doing social media marketing to market your business online? If no, you are missing a great audience to market your products / services. If yes, I would love to hear your experiences.

Once your website is up and running, you need to track its performance and have an insight into the behavior of your visitors. You might be wondering what purpose is served by web analytics and web tracking? Well, unless you have these data to analyze, you won’t know where your business is heading to and will be unable to take effective business decisions. 

Website analytics and website tracking will help you to know:

• Number of visitors to your site and their respective countries
• Time spent on your site
• The top landing pages
• The top exit pages
• Keywords used by your visitors
• Referral sites from where they have arrived at your web page
• Their browsing paths through your site
• Number of new / returning visitors
• The browsers used by them
• The preferences shown by your visitors

As the ultimate aim of almost every business is to get an enviable ROI (Return on Investment), knowing the preferences of your visitors will help you to plan your online strategies in addition to finalizing the sales and marketing proposals.

The data provided by the website analytics will also help you to fine-tune your site. If you find that visitors are leaving from some particular web pages, you may compare them with the top landing pages of your site and try to figure out what went wrong. Once you get the reason, fix the problem. Knowing the geographical location of your visitors may help in geo-targeting. Keywords that these people have used to find your site will be useful in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you find that many people are landing at your “portfolio” or “price-quote” page but none or very few are going to the “place your order” section, check the internal navigation and ensure that there’s no problem while submitting the order form.

These and some other information will surely help your online business. That’s the reason why you should say yes to web tracking and web analytics.

If budget is a problem Google Analytics is a FREE and great Website analytics tool, and is enough for a small business company that wants to track and improve its ROI.

Remember that NOT tracking your website’s visitor behavior means not knowing how to make more sales or not knowing why there were a lot of sales or no sales at all.

Web analytics is like a doctor examining his patient. Like a proper medicine can improve health, a proper analytics and decision can tremendously improve your return on investment on your online business.