Searching online can not only be fun, but you sometimes need to be downright inventive.

For those of you who have been searching online for years now, you've probably adapted ways & techniques to find what you are looking for quickly.

Unfortunately when it comes to promoting your site, nothing out there is classified as a quick fix. If people say it's a quick fix, it probably has a major risk attached to it.

Your ultimate goal when promoting your site should be to acquire some of those "Big" search terms online! For example, "Marketing Tips" or "Marketing" in general. The only way to ever come close to Big Dogs is to start small. Increase search term and decrease your competition.

Here's an example of this, let's use "Marketing". Wow, what a powerful search term, but someone has to get it, right?

As of today, June 1st, 2004, if you search for "Marketing" you will get 72,700,000 results found within Google. That's a tough one.

Going further, let's add "Marketing Tips", you get: 7,560,000 results found.

Going a little further now, let's add "Web Marketing Tips", you'll get around: 5,760,000 results found.

Let's go beyond that for our final search, let's add "Web Site Marketing Tips", you'll get: 4,940,000 results found.

One of weakest areas of modern tactical marketing is integration of online activity. The finest website and most carefully planned search engine marketing campaign are both significantly hobbled if they aren't tightly interwoven.

Search engine marketing has work to do

Search engine marketing communicates a message and drives action. If a search engine result can pull someone to your website, opportunity to communicate in a targeted fashion is enormous. But that means that your listing in search results and your website have to work together. That link must lure them in and website must present information visitors came for. Now, some people are going to tell you that search engine marketing is a branding vehicle, and that you can't judge its success by its pull. We think that's pure nonsense.

Of all search engine listings we've reviewed very few of them take visitors to a page on their website that contains explicit calls to action (visit, call, learn, contact, etc.) Once a call to action appears, your listings effectiveness must be based on whether that action is taken. From that point on, branding argument becomes branding excuse for search engine marketing that fails.

What should happen is that these visitors should be sent to a unique page on your site, where they are presented with graphical and verbal information that relates directly to message they responded to. It should talk about same specific topic relating to keyword they searched on. And it should itself contain further calls to action (which may be nothing more than links to other equally focused content on your website).

The Web is not a dumping ground