SEM or Search Engine Marketing – is the fastest growing form of online marketing. It’s really not a form… it essentially is the driving component behind most all online marketing.
The bottom line is… outside of paying for your website traffic, if you want pages of your site to appear on the first few pages of the search results of the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo)then you must engage in and become proficient at SEM.
Getting your website (more accurately your web pages) in the top pages of the search results delivers to you by the search engines more market awareness and branding than all other advertising combined.
When speaking of getting your pages ranked at the top of the search engine results, this is referring to the organic search results. An organic search result is whereby a searcher finds websites via the unpaid listings that come up
and not via the paid advertising links that populate the sides of the page.
Per Per Click or PPC as it is known is an advertising tool used by businesses and websites where they pay a determined amount each time on of their ads is clicked on. In other words, they pay for this traffic to land on their chosen page. The fee that the advertiser pays per click is determined by a bidding process. The amount of the bid necessary to garner a good position in the presented list of ads is determined by a number of criteria driven by the keyword that they want to bid on.
This is very simple, quick mention of the PPC process. Pay Per Click is indeed much more involved and complex, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on the organic searches.
When comes to search engines there are still really only three (well actually only one)that dominate the market share, and they are Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing). In fact, there is one that dominates even this short list… Google.
Numbers vary, but even today, it is estimated that Google’s share of the search engine market is in the neighborhood of 70%.
With the search engine being the engine that determine the ranking of web pages which ultimately determines the amount of traffic that comes to a site, suffice it to say that it is a crucial strategy to make the search engines happy with your website and pages.
Enter Search Engine Optimization next…
