Search Engine Marketing: The act of marketing a website via search engines to drive dramatically increased amounts of profitable traffic to your site with the best return on investment. SEM is a form of Internet marketing that helps to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages. Search Engine Marketing is a broad term that describes all of the activities used to promote websites. Many marketers have difficulty understanding search engine marketing and they rely on third-party agencies to manage their search marketing. ln any successful marketing strategy, it is important to ensure that you know whom your audience is and how to reach them. In the same way, search engine marketers must ensure that their SEO campaign targets the correct keywords or search phrases. A Search Engine Marketing Professional knows the ways to locate your site among the top pages of websites on World Wide Web. For this, they have Search engine optimization tools and tactics.
SEM methods include:
- Search Engine Optimization (or SEO),
- Paid Placement, and
- Paid Inclusion.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process used to increase the number of visitors to a website by improving the ranking within a search engine.
Paid placements, also known as Pay Per Click. PPC is the most common form of SEM. Website owners choose keywords and then bid an amount they are willing to pay for every click on that keyword – the higher the bid the higher the placement. PPC is slightly different for each search engine but the basics are the same.
Paid Inclusion is the system whereby a webmaster pays a search engine company to have their page included in a search index.
Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most popular form of SEM, These Search Engine Marketing methods can be a great way to drive a good amount of traffic to your website. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.