Search Engine Marketing
Search engine Marketing or SEM is Internet Marketing that helps improve your rankings on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s). The maximum part of traffic when delivered by search engines gives the highest traffic count for your website. The better the page rank you have in the SERP’s, the better visitors find your site via search engines.
Background of SEM
It was about mid 90s when search engines were developed to make searches for websites worldwide. Pay per Click programs came into view since Open Text and Goto.com started offering such services from 1996-1998. Google entered this arena from 2000 via their Adwords program.
PPC Networks or Paid Search Listings
SEM can be performed using effective campaigns like Pay per Click (PPC) or sponsored links and organic links. When you type a search in Google or Yahoo the shaded links on the top or right side of the page are the sponsored links and the rest of the page contains the organic links. Both the campaigns are useful but each one has its gain over the other.
Signing up as an Advertiser at Pay per Click programs has proven to be a successful marketing strategy. Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture are good PPC programs where you can choose your ads by defined keywords related to your website. PPC programs like adwords also helps you in geo-targeting a specific group of visitors. Your ads are placed on relevant websites and the visitors in those websites get directed to your website by a click on your ad for which you agree to pay a fixed price.
Organic Links and Sponsored Links
Organic links are better than sponsored links as they have a huge base of web users. They are the actual results. Users are more likely to accept them easily. At the same time the effect of sponsored links cannot be denied. Positioned at the top of the page it also earns quite a bit of traffic. For sponsored links, the webpage linked to has to pay a certain price for the click that leads a user to their webpage. You should use both the campaigns for successful marketing.
Inbound Links
Getting your website linked from other websites is an effective way of SEM. When highly ranked websites link to your website, the web crawler takes a note of this and your webpage gets increased visibility and impressions via the search engines. You can do this via Directory submissions. Free submissions to Web Directories like DMOZ and to paid submissions like Yahoo can be very helpful.
Search Engine Optimization Software
You can also try some bulk submission software like WEBCEO that automatically submits your website links along with keywords and descriptions to thousands of directories around the world. This makes your work even easier. WEBCEO also has an update feature and it updates its database periodically. It is extremely useful Search Engine Optimizing software that really gives the results you expect.
Ultimately, your Search Engine Marketing depends basically on 3 rules: Keyword, Seniority and Inbound Links. The more optimized your keywords are the better you capture the market. The older a website is, higher are than chances for a high page rank. The more inbound links, the more effective your website will be.
