What is the best search engine marketing plan?

There's no straight-up, easy answer to that question. Because a search engine marketing plan is long-term, all sorts of factors go into deciding on the best course of action.

What you must do, is keep in mind the goal of search engine marketing:
Allow people to find your site (and your phone number) through search engines on the web. These include Google, Yahoo, AOL, AskJeeves, or any other general web search engine that potential clients may use.

When you launch a new website, or a redesigned website, you want to encourage the search engines to find you.

Your website design should include copy that is optimized for certain keywords that the search engines like. There are tools that you can purchase to help you find target keywords. And then there are agencies with experienced people and professional-grade tools to select target keywords. Though more expensive, it often pays off to have experienced people help with the optimization that goes into the design of your site. So far, no software can keep up with subtleties in language the way a human can.

When your finished site is live, submit your URL to the search engines.
Submission asks the search engine spiders (applications that crawl the web indexing all pages of all sites) to look at your site, highlighting your keywords. Again, you have options on how to go about doing this. Your evaluation should include pricing and effectiveness.

• You can submit to each search engine individually, by finding the submissions (sometimes called suggestions) page on each search engine. Make sure to include all the search engines, because the affiliations between them change often.
• You can buy software to submit to all search engines in one fell swoop. Frequent software updates will allow your submissions to stay current with the ever-changing search engine metrics and affiliations.
• You can hire professionals to submit for you. There are agencies that do only search engine marketing, agencies that include search engine marketing as part of a complete web design and development package, and there are full-service marketing agencies that include search engine marketing in their list of services. Whatever the case, go to someone who knows about search engine marketing. They will have the best possible combination of submission techniques. They will have high-level tools for submissions, and will know when it's best to submit directly to search engines due to engine-specific rules and regulations. In addition, search engine marketers can analyze your rankings on a regular basis, and adjust your site to continually boost your rankings.

Paid Search Engine Advertising
Because it can take up to eight months to get crawled by all the search engine spiders and get your rankings up organically, I often recommend that my clients consider the idea of paid search engine advertising in the first couple months to both get hits and push for faster organic rankings.

Following are some paid search engine advertising options:

Google AdWords
Google AdWords is a search engine marketing tool in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks through the ad to their website. This is often a successful way to jumpstart a new website, until organic search engine rankings are up. Any clickthrough will also improve organic rankings on Google, as it will associate your keywords to your site.

Google AdWords are included on many sites and search engines, including AskJeeves and AOL.

How it works:
Advertisers pay $5 to set up an account, and then set a daily and monthly budget, with no minimum fee. Advertisers select keywords to target, and set a maximum amount that they will pay per click (PPC - when a user actually clicks on the ad) for ads that come up on in the paid advertisements section of a Google search results page. Any Google searcher that clicks on an ad and goes to that site generates a charge to the advertiser.

AdWords PPC advertisements are ranked using a combination of click-through-rate (how many users actually click on the ad), cost-per-click (CPC) (higher price bids will get a better chance here), and relevancy of ad text to the keywords.

Google also has a pay per impression (PPM) option for advertisers who want to choose which member sites their ads get placed on. The budgeting is set up the same way.

Yahoo Sponsored Search
Yahoo Sponsored Search is another pay per click (PPC) search engine advertising option. Again, this is a possible short-term vehicle to get customers to your site as organic rankings improve.

Yahoo comes in at a close second to Google in search engine use, and as such deserves consideration.

How it works: Advertisers open an Overture account and maintain a minimum balance of $50, and spend a minimum of $20 per month for the PPC sponsored advertising. (See Google AdWords section above for more details on PPC.) The advertiser selects relevant keywords that will trigger the ad in a paid results section on Yahoo and participating sites and directories.

Yahoo Sponsored Search PPC ads are ranked by cost-per-click, which means that the highest bidder gets the top slot of ads that use the keywords. Note that if an advertiser does not get $20 worth of clicks through per month, he is still charged a minimum of $20. This might provide impetus to review an ad campaign and raise a daily budget or cost per click bid.

Yahoo Sponsored Search is also known as Overture and includes placement on many sites and directories including MSN.com.

Yahoo Directory Submit
Yahoo allows advertisers to pay $299 to submit their URL to the Yahoo Directory. This does not guarantee that the site will be linked in the directory, just that the directory spider will assess the site.

If a site is accepted in the Yahoo Directory, there is a $299 annual fee to maintain the listing.

In general, this is a low cost marketing vehicle, but I have found that it has not generated enough business for my attorney clients to pay for itself.

National Legal Directory Paid Submission
Check to see which directories and associations you are already a part of - your bar association? Your local community directory? Use these to your advantage. Most important in these directories is linking to your website(s). I cannot stress the importance of linking to your sites. Relevant links (links that come from sites with related material to yours) will both generate traffic and boost your search engine rankings.

FindLaw - findlaw.com
Lots of attorneys are familiar with FindLaw. This makes FindLaw a good resource when marketing to other attorneys. That most non-lawyers are not familiar with FindLaw makes it a non-cost-effective tool to market to the general public.

Because lawyers are familiar with this site, it would be worthwhile to consider FindLaw a viable option for Lawyer to Lawyer marketing. Note that negotiations can be made with the FindLaw sales staff as to the price of advertisements.

Thompson Legal Record/West Legal Directory
This also appears to be a directory that attorneys are familiar with, and as such may use to find services from other lawyers. I recommend that my clients keep their information on this site updated, and include a link to their site(s). The link is important here, as organic search engine rankings include relevant links in the determining algorithm. Links from well-known legal directories are valuable both for generating clicks, as well as for search engine rankings.

For attorneys that already have entries in this directory, so there is no additional cost for this marketing vehicle.

Martindale-Hubbell - martindale-hubbell.com, martindale.com
Another well-known resource for attorneys, attorneys are listed in a directory by practice area. It is worthwhile to consider paying for inclusion for both the potential clients that may come from this site, as well as for the links that will boost your search engine rankings.

Associations
Consider joining national and local associations to boost search engine rankings.
Use your current memberships to state and city bar or trial lawyers associations to both drive traffic to your site and boost those search engine rankings.

American Bar Association - abanet.org

Association of Trial Lawyers of America - atlanet.org

YourState Bar Association

YourCity Bar Association

YourState Trial Lawyers Association

After all that, what's your best plan?