Search Engine Marketing: A General Overview

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of designing, adjusting and coding your Web site to achieve top listings for your industry terms (key phrases).

Within the field, there are two main areas of activity:

Optimization (making a site highly-relevant for both search engines and searchers)

Paid Search (paying for each user to be directed to your site)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of making a site and its content highly-relevant for both search engines and searchers. Optimization may involve design/layout changes, new text for the title-tags, meta-tags, alt- attributes, headings, and changes to the sites text. Link campaigns are also a part of SEO. They can be highly effective at both bringing in traffic from the links and by helping your rankings. If you have numerous links from relevant communities/authorities, the search engines see them as votes of confidence. This area has a number of different names, including Organic-, Natural- and Algorithm-based.

Paid Search

This form of advertising is done by auction and some of the bid listing providers are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search. Most search engine results pages (SERPs) have these paid forms of search marked by such designators as "sponsored listings" and are usually found at the top of a results page above the "natural" search results and/or to the right of the natural results. This area has a number of different names, including pay-per-click (PPC), pay-for-performance (PFP), and paid-for-search.

Three Main Types of "Search Engines"

Spider/Crawler-based Search Engines (SE's)

These automated engines, such as Google, regularly "spider'"or "crawl" your site to find the content and index your site's pages within their databases. Each search engine of this type has proprietary algorithms that "read" your website's content and establish "context". This helps the search engine determine how relevant your website is should a user be searching for information like what you site provides.

Manual Directories

These types of site, such as Yahoo's Directory, are organized by people who evaluate relevancy by hand. Directories are not really engines that search; rather more like yellow pages.

Paid-For Listing Services

Essentially, if you're the highest bidder, you get the highest results, shown in many engines' listings just above the crawler- or directory-based listings. Google is a search engine, but also has a paid service called AdWords and sells sponsored listings that are clearly separate from the organic results.