Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 180

Capturing Traffic with Search Marketing
IN THIS CHAPTER
Focusing on search marketing fundamentals
Analyzing search queries
Optimizing for search traffic on popular sites
Attracting robots
Earning links to your web pages
No discipline in digital marketing has evolved over the years quite as dramatically as
search marketing. In the early days of the Internet, search engines like Alta Vista, Lycos,
and Yahoo! were fairly unsophisticated. Search marketers who understood the simple
factors these sites used to rank websites could drive search engine traffic to a page
regardless of its quality.
Today, search engines like Google consider hundreds of factors in deciding which web
page to display for a search. In the current search marketing landscape, the best web pages
usually win. Sure, loopholes still exist, exploited by less-than-reputable search marketers,
but the scales have tipped toward those who play by the rules. In this chapter, you discover
those rules and put yourself in a great position to receive traffic from the billions of
searches that take place each day.
Search isn’t limited to big search engines like Google and Bing. Social media sites such as
Facebook and Pinterest also have search capabilities. Also, Amazon, iTunes, TripAdvisor,
and thousands of other sites provide search to their users. Depending on your business, it
can be more valuable to understand how search operates on YouTube or Amazon than on
Google or Bing.