First off, from a semantic standpoint, it’ll probably be beneficial to refer to “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) and “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) as two different things. SEO typically implies optimizing your site to capitalize on organic (unpaid) traffic to your site. SEM is what you guys are talking about… paying for ads on search engines.

I know it’s nitpicking, but I’ve met too many business developers who think SEO simply equates to advertising on search engines. This simplification leads to overlooking many quick fixes that can be a boon to free search engine traffic. Wikipedia puts it beautifully:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.

The next response to my friend:

Personally I think SEO is overrated, and if you try to make your site as usable as possible for humans, it will work great for search engines. You’re doing OK here, but I would definitely revisit the meta content on each one of your pages. You “should” have a title, description, and (much less important) keywords specified for every page on your site. The title and description is what gets seen in Google, and the more attractive the combo, the more likely someone is to click.

I’ve seen too many SEO companies charge too much money for services that don’t deliver. I’ve also tried almost every optimization technique I’ve come across, and not many are worth the time for research and/or execution. So for SEO, just do the important things:

• Write unique meta content
• Optimize for users
• Use code that spiders can read

And finally my take on SEM:

Because SEM on search engines is a bidding system, it’s best to take a trial-and-error approach. Since you can cap keyword spending, my suggestion would be to just go with whatever your first inclination is, and then tweak accordingly. Companies that spend a good amount of money on SEM will have someone devoted almost full time to analyzing and tweaking the spending on ads.

I think you’ve got a solid list of keywords to start with, so just throw them in, keep a low cap, and see what happens! AdWords and Google Analytics (which you’re already using) have fantastic linking capabilities, so just make sure that gets set up and you can see what happens.

SEM is basically just a statistics game. Add keywords, analyze, adjust, repeat. Trying to come up with “the right” keywords is often a waste of time. Make a quick list, then use these tools to get more:

• Google Sets
• Ask.com – Check the “Expand” or “Narrow” suggestions on the search results pages

For AdSense, go the Signup page, fill out the form, customize an ad using the wizard, grab the ad code, and paste it wherever you want on your site. Much like AdWords and other statistics driven advertising, I’ve found it’s best to just dive right and adjust as you go. If you are looking to produce ad revenue, put a few ads in places you think make sense, and check their performance regularly. Things that can increase performance:

• Change color, style, or type (images, text, or both?) of ad units
• Change location and type (banner, skyscraper, etc.) of ad units
• Change number of ad units on the page
• Experiment with other AdSense offerings (AdSense for search!)

Every site should have Google Analytics. It’s incredibly easy to setup and use, requires no maintenance, and its free. To sign up, head to the Analytics main page and fill out the form. Once you’re done, all you have to do is apply the provided code on every page of your site. If you’re following best practices, this should be as easy as throwing it in one of your include files! Some tips:

• Despite the fact that the documentation tells you to put the tracking code between the <head></head> tags, I’d put it as the last thing on the page, immediately before the final </body> tag. I’d much rather miss out on tracking a person than impede the user experience with longer page load times!
• Many people will spend hours looking through their analytics data, until they manufacture trends and analysis. Wasteful. Once you know what’s provided in Google Analytics, only check when you know in advance what data you are trying to analyze.
• Hide the Analytics code on your development site. You’d be surprised how much development testing can skew your data.

I’ll revisit Analytics and AdSense strategy at some point in the future. For now, dive in and have fun!