The Internet now rules the roost as the most preferred form of communication for billions of individuals across the world. The popularity, reach, and the preference for the online medium have prompted marketers to utilize this medium to get across their messages.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one kind of Internet marketing that seeks to increase the visibility of a website by securing a high rank for it on the search engine result page. Search Engine Marketing tactics include these four strategies–search engine optimization (SEO), contextual advertising, paid placement, and paid inclusion.
The SEO process, when trying to secure a page for a website, considers only unpaid search results. This is the modus operandi: SEO takes into account how search engines work and the topics which people hunt for the most. The website developers when developing the site, prepare the content such that it is relevant to the specific keywords and the index mechanism of the search engines do not face obstacles when determining the page ranking for the site. They also try to increase the number of inbound links that are featured on the page.
In contextual advertising, the promotional messages are targeted towards the specific group of audience who might be interested in the product or the service. These advertisements are displayed only on those websites that contain associated content. A software program runs in the background to decide which advertisements will be selected to be featured.
Paid placement, in Internet advertising lingo, is more commonly referred to as Pay Per Click PPC. The advertisers pay the host only when a featured advertisement is clicked. When the host is a search engine, advertisers generally bid on specific keywords or phrases that they think are appropriate for the target audience while content-based websites generally have a fixed price system in place for featuring advertisements.
Paid inclusion is also known as sponsored listings. In this method of marketing, the search engine companies levy a charge on the website who request to be featured on their index. All search engines provide sponsored listings, except Google.
There is however, a raging debate on what constitutes SEM. The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), many industry experts, and various research organizations and websites consider SEO to be an important component of Internet marketing strategies. New York Times however, considers SEM to be just the practice of purchasing paid search listings.
Nonetheless, SEM continues to thrive; the Chinese search engine Baidu notched up its profits by as much as 118% from last year. This phenomenal rise was steered by the increase in their online marketing revenues that went up by 74%.
The Internet marketing mavericks at www.ebrandz.com harness the power of the medium to bring in profits for their clients.
