Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing explained: What it is, how it works, how to do it, hints & tips, advice, useful resources.
Search Engine Marketing
There are two main components to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), these are:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to achieve higher results in the natural listings.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising where you place adverts on the search engine results pages which are independent of your results in the natural listings.
Search Engine Optimisation
The goal here is to ensure that your site achieves maximum exposure to your target audience when they are using search engines such as Google or MSN. Over 80% of internet users regularly use search engines to find things on the web, so good rankings in the search engines can produce a huge amount of traffic to your site — free of charge.
Many searches will produce thousands, even millions of results that match to some extent the words (search terms) that the user entered. These will be presented in order of relevance (as determined by a complex algorithm within the search engine), with what the search engine believes to be the most relevant results presented first. The techniques used to determine relevance vary from search engine to search engine and change all the time as the SE companies improve their service.
Because of the enormous amount of free traffic (and therefore business) that can be generated by good listings in the search engines, a whole industry has grown up around improving position (or ranking) in the search engine results. Like any high-profit / no investment required business, it has attracted from the beginning a large number of shysters and get rich quick merchants employing dubious practices to generate artificially high rankings.
The search engine companies go to great lengths to defeat this artificial manipulation of their results in the interests of giving the user a better experience, which leads more users to come back to them rather than use a competing search engine.
Most of the dubious techniques for manipulating ranking have now been bypassed by the search engines so that they no longer work, and will cause the offending site to be penalized or even removed from the listings altogether.
Now in 2005, the only way to consistently achieve good rankings in the search engines is to have lots of good content that is presented in the correct way. There are no short cuts and not really any tricks any more — content is king.
Nevertheless, there are still certain legitimate optimization techniques that can (and must) be applied for a site to achieve its optimum position in the natural listings.
It is important to understand that building good results in the natural listings takes time. There are no instant guaranteed results, however it's usually possible to achieve good results within 3-4 months.
To achieve (literally) instant results in search engine marketing, use pay-per-click advertising.
Read more about Search Engine Optimisation.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-Per-Click adverts are the adverts that appear next to (or above) the natural results on a search engine results page.
They have the advantage of being controllable – you pay for your place on the page rather than hoping that the search engine will find you.
They are also instant. Your adverts appear straight away whereas a traditional SEO campaign might take months before results appear in the natural rankings.
You only pay when a viewer clicks on your advert (and is directed to your site), not when the advert is shown. In other words, you only pay for results - typically 5p to £5 per click depending upon how competitive the keywords you are bidding for are.
Campaigns can be started, stopped, altered, re-written, with the results happening within minutes. Daily budgets can be set to control your expenditure and everything can be measured so you can see what works and what doesn’t.
PPC advertising therefore offers some extraordinary benefits over other forms of advertising. However, it takes a considerable amount of skill to develop and run successful campaigns.
Useful Resources
Latest News articles on search engine optimisation
09/03/2010 Google And Dish Network Test TV Search Engine (NPR) Google has partnered itself with Dish Network to test a television search engine that would compile results from both traditional programming and web video services.
10/03/2010 PeekYou Appoints Search Engine Marketing Expert Eric Ludwig President & COO (PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance) PeekYou, a people search engine whose database contains records for over 230 million people, is pleased to announce the appointment of Eric Ludwig as President & COO. Ludwig brings over 15 years of experience in technology commercialization and marketing to PeekYou, and is tasked with developing new tools and applications for its social search and reputation management platform.
10/03/2010 Bitrix Introduces the D.I.G.(TM) Engine: the Ultimate in Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 Search Technology (PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance) Bitrix, Inc. , a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces D.I.G. technology - an advanced search engine developed specifically for enterprise intranets and websites that enables high-performance data search in texts, media content and documents with smart ranking, sorting and display.
10/03/2010 Business Professionals Invited to Learn How to Use Search Engine Marketing (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Network Solutions® is inviting local business professionals to learn how to use search engine marketing effectively in information-packed seminars. Taking place at New York City's NYC Seminar & Conference Center on March 17, and Newark, New Jersey's Sheraton Newark Airport Hotel on March 18, each seminar will run from 8 a.m. -12 p.m.
09/03/2010 Advanced Search Engine Rankings Tracker – SEJ Tools (Search Engine Journal) One of the most advanced and usable features inside SEJ tools is its SERP tracker. The benefits of the tool include: (!) The tool is easy to use and configure;(!) The tool is organically integrated with all other tools inside which makes adding terms to tracker simple and fun;(!) The tool generates pretty and well-organized reports; etc. Step… Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine ...