Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an Internet marketing strategy which aims to promote a website by increasing its visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

There are a variety of different marketing methods involved in effective search engine marketing including search engine optimisation (SEO), paid placement and paid inclusion.

The term Search Engine Marketing is used to cover the different activities which website design and search engine optimisation companies use to describe their services and on-line marketing strategies for individuals, businesses and organisations.

The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft / Live and Ask.com have search engine marketing facilities which are global, therefore using these offers the potential for a product or business to become truly world wide.

Other search engines which are individual to specific countries such as Rambler (Russia), Timway (Hong Kong) and Baidu (China) can effectively be used when a business or individual wishes to remain solely within their own geographical area.

Effective search engine marketing is an extremely cost effective method of promoting and advertising a business, however, it can be very time consuming and unless there is a suitably computer literate person employed within a business; the probability of the marketing being truly successful is not likely. Consultancy firms who specialise in search engine marketing can be engaged to carry out the whole process on a company’s behalf.

Professional Search Engine Marketing campaigns incorporate a variety of different marketing approaches in order to increase the volumes of traffic to a website and make the website visible to the search engines by engaging these different marketing tactics.

Many people and businesses are under the illusion that simply by having a website their products or services will automatically become noticed. This is definitely not so.

In order to make a website fully serve its purpose it has to be kept in the forefront of consumer’s minds and also remain visible to the search engines. This can be achieved by using specific search engine marketing technologies and techniques which keep a website fresh and alive over designated and agreed periods of time.

One of the most effective search engine marketing techniques is to have a website which is search engine optimised in a host of different ways.

Most commonly, web-page content can be created which include keywords - specific words which the search engines actively search for and use to provide web users with the websites which most closely match the words and searches they are looking for.

Videos can also be search engine optimised to bring them to the attention of the search engines.

Other search engine marketing techniques include the use of paid inclusion. These are where business’ can pay to be included in search engine listings and should not be confused with page-ranking.

Page-ranking is carried out periodically by the search engines themselves. They look at websites pages and if they meet specific criteria they are given a page-rank number.

Once a websites pages have been ranked it opens a whole new approach and capabilities of increasing effective marketing techniques.