Putting My Internet Marketing Skills Where My Mouth Is

Before I moved to Qualicum Beach on beautiful Vancouver Island and set up Geeks on the Beach, I taught a university-level computer course geared towards business owners with web sites entitled "Search Engine Marketing and Optimization".

The students that sat in on my class paid a few hundred dollars to listen to me teach them how to improve their business by promoting their websites.

Now that I'm creating another web site, this time for my own computer / software / website creation business, it's time to put my search engine marketing lessons into practice and my supposed expertise to the test.

In other words, it's time to put my Internet marketing skills where my mouth is.

While not a replacement for an intensive, three-day seminar, this article will show how you can get started marketing and promoting your website by targeting your content to the precise words and phrases your potential visitors already use when they search for web sites like yours.

Since nobody understands what people are searching for better than Google, and since they also happen to offer a free, best in class tool for sorting through that information, we'll be using their Keyword Tool throughout this lesson.

While intended for Google AdWord customers to better taget their online marketing campaigns, we'll be (mis)using the tool for our own purposes. Specifically, we'll be using the Google Keyword Tool to find out what people actually search for on the web, as opposed to what we think they search for or what we would be searching for.

I strongly suggest that this should be your first stop in creating a search engine optimization (better known in the web design biz by the acronym "SEO") gameplan. The sooner you consult the oracles at Google, the better. It may even help you choose the most promising domain name before you've registered it.

If you already have a website but feel it's not performing for you as well as it could be, not to worry; it's never too late to get started targeting your audience, promoting your website and improving your bottom-line.

At the end of this lesson, you're going to have a list of keyword phrases based on actual real-world data. Tack this list to your wall near your computer and refer back to it often as you add content to your website and grow your business.

Watching Over My Shoulder

Since this article is about search engine marketing, let's use that as our example, looking for keywords related to the field of Internet marketing .

As you follow along, you'll be replacing my examples with words and phrases relevant to your business website. Whatever you're business happens to be and regardless of the audience you're trying to attract to your website find that the same principles can be applied.

My business just so happens to be website design and the promotion that goes along with it.

It's more than a bit self-referential, but you're going to be reading an article about search engine optimization, written by a supposed SEO expert using keywords and phrases realted to the subject of Internet marketing and promotion as examples. At the end of this lesson, I'll be using the list that I create during this process in order to improve the rankings of my own web site.

Think of it as watching over my shoulder.

The interesting offshoot of all this is that you'll be able to check back here and see how well the tactics that I reccomend that you use work out for me.

So, without further ado, let's take a look at the Google Keyword Tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and start building a search engine marketing strategy.