These next two sections explain how search engines are generally used in marketing. These are slowly being replaced by social media. In fact, most of these are trying to become social media. But that’s another topic for another day…

How to actually use search engines to find potential clients
But there is a single principle involved here: you want to be able to get onto the first page or two of Google and stay there long enough for your most valuable clients to find you.  That’s the simplicity of it.  When you want to expand your client base, you get back into promoting for new visitors you can turn into clients.

And mostly, we’ve already covered how to do this: simple, basics of SEO applied to each page as you write them, and posting your content on social media sites (which includes using a blog platform to hose your main site.) This gets you rapidly onto Google’s top listings. The more valuable content you post on a regular basis and the longer you stay up there.

I’ll go over this in more detail later, but the crux of search engine use is in helping people find your site to begin with. That’s mostly all they are good for. It doesn’t mean they are going to find it later by using search engines (unless they forget your name). And frankly, that is all they are good for.

Once people select their communities, they find more resources through that community, not through the search engines. Word of mouth, actually. They follow and subscribe to people they trust and use these peoples’ recommendations. Like habits, they continue to mostly check on their email and their favorite sites. People mostly don’t use search engines in their daily living – they are checking out their neighborhood for new stuff from the their network of friends.

This means most of this emphasis on search engines in Internet Marketing is overblown.
Search engines and advertising are like the old Big 3 TV networks and advertising. Companies who think they have to do a lot of advertising support a great number of outlets just so they can get their advertising dollar spent. Yet advertising is expensive and 97% of it is wasted. What Google, Yahoo, and others are doing is to set aside their prime eye-ball real estate (what and where exactly people tend to look at first on the page) for advertising. And charge extra for people to have their ad in this particular spot.

Google and others sell advertising spots by Keyword and then present them on the appropriate pages. By creating a bidding war for certain keywords, they make more money. In addition to that, they entice individuals to put ads on their own sites by paying them (usually a paltry pittance for the hours of work they do providing content – just to have another distraction taking their traffic somewhere else).

The kicker is that the bulk of humankind Internet users train themselves to ignore these ads. Again – you’re left with the 3 percent who are trusting or gullible enough to click-through.

Advertising is how search engines support themselves. So it’s here to stay – until search engines are themselves replaced. And this movement is en-route. (Again, I’ll tell you more of this later, though the basics are outlined above.)

Once you have helped your visitors become loyal clients, then they come directly to your blog and search engine sources are the minority. You will also find that your bounces (people who stay less than 30 seconds and visit no other page) decline proportionately. Direct access and referrals rise dramatically (loyal clients and word of mouth).

Some additional posts of interest:

• Misuse “Conversation Domination” for SEO – its flaws and failures
• Laws of Keyword Usage – all keywords are not created equal
• WordPress site-building sequence
• Waste your time with PageRank instead of improving user experience.
• What to do with spam comments
• The death of search engines isn’t widely exaggerated at all…
• Keywords which don’t tell you anything about the Gorilla in the room