What Exactly Is Search Engine Marketing or SEM?
The term Search Engine Marketing often referred to as “SEM” can cover many different types of online marketing. It can be an effective way to get people to visit your website, buy your products or use your services online.
You want as much targeted traffic to your site as possible. Note the use of the word “targeted”.
Many sites offer services where they promise to deliver a certain amount of traffic to your website. But often this is not targeted traffic. The visitors have little interest in your website because they are untargeted. They often leave as quickly as they arrive at your site.
Getting targeted traffic is important because you want to match your visitors as closely as possible to the products or services you are offering. That alone will increase the success of your website. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell a product, offer a service or simply build up a successful site – targeted traffic is essential to the success of any site.
Pay Per Click Marketing
The most obvious and expensive form of Search Engine Marketing is Pay Per Click or PPC marketing. Often, people expect huge volumes of converting traffic from Pay Per Click campaigns. Actually what they get is a huge bill for clicks which only resulted in a few extra sales if any. The disadvantage to PPC is of course that you are paying for every click. I’ve seen entire project budgets disappear due to poor Pay Per Click management.
Pay Per Click is a tool and it can be powerful if used correctly. But few people spend the time learning enough about the inner workings of how to use PPC effectively. If you’re not prepared to get into Pay Per Click deeply and don’t want to risk spending a fortune on wasted clicks it’s best to leave it alone.
Search Engine Optimization
Probably the most popular Search Engine Marketing area is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Most people will of heard the term SEO at some time. The goal of SEO is to get free traffic to your site from Search Engines.
The major advantage to SEO is that once you’ve met the initial cost of getting SEO work done, every single click is free. It is normally the aim of Search Engine Optimization to get your site listed within the top 10 natural results for particular keywords or phrases.
In highly competitive markets it can be difficult to get a top 10 listing for popular keywords. Many Internet Markets are now targeting so called, “long-tail keywords”. These are keywords or phrases where there are established searches everyday but a low number of competing websites.
Search Engine Optimization essentially falls under two different categories. Onsite SEO and Offsite SEO.
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO focuses on changes to a website’s code or text with the aim of making the site more attractive to the Search Engines. It may involve the inclusion of targeted keywords and also making sure there are no problems, which could stop Search Engine spiders or “bots” from accessing the site.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO essentially covers everything that is not onsite SEO! This normally involves building links on other websites back to your website. There are many ways to do this and I will go into some more details about some different techniques in future posts.
Posts
