High ranking in the search engines can make a dramatic impact on your business performance. In order to obtain top placement in search result you can either hire a professional Search Engine Optimization company or make some adjustments to your website yourself. If you have enough free time and choose the second option, here are some tips for you to follow in your free Search Engine Marketing campaign.

The first stage of free Search Engine Marketing is Keyword Research. You must have a clear idea of what search phrases your potential customers might type in when looking for the products or services that you offer. It can be just one word (e.g. “real-estate”) or a long multiword search phrase like “Florida real-estate services”. The latter is more preferable to target, while more specific searchers are more likely to be motivated shoppers rather than accidental visitors.

Try brainstorming the potential keywords considering alternative wordings and geographical modifiers. When you’ve come up with a list of about 20 keyword phrases, find out which of them are most often used by the searchers, but bear in mind that the more competitive a search term is, the harder it is to win high rankings for it. The best way out is to find a sort of middle ground between popularity with the searchers and the level of competition. And of course the selected keywords should be highly relevant to your business.

The next step of free Search Engine Marketing efforts is content development. Content is a critical component of success in search engine listings. Your selected keywords and phrases should be strategically placed on the web pages and backed up by relevant, informative and unique textual information. That is what search engines are looking for when evaluating the websites. Moreover, content is the main traffic-generating factor, while information is the primary concern of Internet users. 

Here are some techniques you may employ for your site:
• Keywords and phrases should be placed in headings and HTML title tags.
• They can be typed in bold and italics where appropriate.
• Links to other pages can be paraphrased so as to include the keyword.
• Don’t display keywords in images and Flash. Although they do look more appealing to users, search engine spiders can only read and index text.

Free Search Engine Marketing can not succeed without a strong link building strategy. Each link to your site is read by the search engines as a sign of your popularity and will positively influence your rankings. But the degree of that influence depends on the quality of your incoming links, not on their quantity. The websites linking to yours should be relevant to your business niche and have some authority on the web. Think of non-competing sites that could be interested in linking to you and contact them showing the benefits their clients would get from knowing about your site. 

There are many more techniques you can apply to your site on your own. Explore and try them in your do-it-yourself free Search Engine Marketing Campaign.