Wednesday, August 1, 2012

What is SEM? (Search Engine Marketing) - Internet Marketing Services

SEM or Search engine marketing is one of the most popular forms of internet marketing. It primarily involves enhancing the visibility of a website on the Search Engine Result Pages or in short, the SERPs. There are various onsite and offsite techniques as well as paid advertising platforms that are employed as a part of the SEM strategy. Some of the paid advertising platforms include Google AdWord?s Pay Per Click (PPC) system, Paid Inclusions, and Contextual advertising.

How does SEM work?

SEM combines pay per click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) to promote a website. By improving the organic search results ranking of the website and creating targeted and relevant PPC ads, SEM efforts enable website to grab the top spot on the SERPs. The organic search results are free listings and web optimization improves the ranking of the website by making them more search engine friendly and relevant to users.

Both on page as well as off page techniques are integral to SEM.

Onsite SEO includes a wide array of processes in which a website is formatted according to the guidelines of a search engine (e.g. Google Webmaster Guidelines) to make the indexing process easier. This includes the individual elements of the page like the page titles, descriptions, sitemaps, Meta information, page load time, readable design & layout, etc.

Offsite SEO improves the ranking of a website using content syndication in the form of videos, articles, press releases, forum commenting, blogs, etc. This syndicated content is a valuable source of backlinks that play a key role in improving the online visibility of the website. Search engine algorithms also take the quality and the number of backlinks into account while assigning a website its PageRank.

Why SEM matters to your business?

Search Engine Marketing is one the most cost effective and measurable ways to attract potential leads and prospects. SEM helps online businesses maximize their potential ROI through targeted, qualified, and immediate traffic to your website. PPC based advertising programs such as Google AdWords offer geo targeting options along with ad scheduling. Local businesses find these options extremely handy as they can target a specific geographical area to boost their online presence. Apart from improving their online branding and improving the search engine ranking, SEM is a great way to target specific products or services of your business while increasing your bottom line.

Commonly used terms in the article:

SERPs: Search engine results pages or the listing of web pages generated by a search engine is response to a user?s search query

Google AdWords: Google?s flagship PPC based advertising product

Contextual advertising: A form of targeted advertising where advertisements are displayed on websites as well as other media such as mobile browsers. Google AdSense is an ad serving product where content is displayed to the users through ad selection by automated systems.

PageRank: A Google trademark, this is a link analysis algorithm that is used by Google to assign a numerical weight to all the elements of a webpage.

Source: http://www.internetmarketingelites.com/1903/what-is-sem/

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