Search Engine Marketing, Inc, by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt

Search engine marketing, which goes far beyond search engine optimization, is an incredibly important part of Internet marketing. It is concerned with not only how to optimized your pages and make them visible to the search engines, but also with other strategic marketing issues like purchasing keywords, and the role of search engine marketing in your overall marketing mix as a means to realize your marketing goals. If you do any marketing at all, in addition to SEO, then SEM is something you must know about in the age of Internet.

However, learning about search engine marketing is difficult and at times frustrating. It is a large field, and it is fairly complicated. And while there are lots of people and businesses that are glad to tell you the secrets of how to get into one of the top positions on a search engine most of them are old techniques that don’t work any more.

Search Engine Marketing Inc. : Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site, Second Edition, can not solve all you online marketing problems for you. Nor can it makes it easy for you to learn – there simply is a lot to learn, and no easy way to learn it without a investing a bit of time and effort. That said – this book is one of the best tools for learning this difficult trade that I have ever come across. A very serious, very thorough book which covers the whole field from A to Z.

The authors examine the details of how a search engine really works, how they rank search results and what you can do to get to the top of the heap. They also give you all the basic search marketing methods. One of the most interesting parts of the book is a section on understanding how a person thinks when they are issuing a search query.

The process they outline is simple yet very powerful if followed. First you have to identify the goals of your web site. If you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish then you are unlikely to accomplish it. Then you determine how to measure the success of your website. After this you develop a search marketing strategy and how you are going to measure the success of your marketing efforts. If you are in a larger company the authors even include a section on selling your search marketing proposal to your company.

Content:

Part 1 – The Basics of Search Marketing: Why Search Marketing Is Important… And Difficult; How Search Engines Work; How Search Marketing Works; How Searchers Work

Part 2 – Develop Your Search Marketing Program: Identify Your Web Site’s Goals; Measure Your Web Site’s Success; Measure Your Search Marketing Success; Define Your Search Marketing Strategy; Sell Your Search Marketing Proposal

Part 3 – Execute Your Search Marketing Program: Get Your Site Indexed; Choose Your Target Keywords; Optimize Your Content; Attract Links To Your Site; Optimize Your Paid Search Program; Make Search Marketing Operational; What’s Next?

Glossary; Index

Regardless of where your organization is located and regardless of your organizational size and structure, this is a very worthwhile book if you spend dollars for marketing online.

You’ll learn how to

Whether you’re a marketing, Web, or IT professional, product manager, or content specialist, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Second Edition will help you define your SEO/SEM goals, craft a best-practices program for achieving them, and implement it flawlessly. I strongly recommend this book! If you are serious about not wasting them and concerned about using them as effectively as possible, then this book is for you!

PS: The book also comes with a valuable DVD which includes over 2 hours of exclusive how-to video presentations, plus audio interviews and white papers on cutting-edge search engine marketing topics.

Links to Search Engine Marketing Inc. at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Tagged as: Bill Hunt, book review, Mike Moran, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO