Defining Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Website or we can say that maintaining a good position in SERPs.

Search Engine Marketing has three main methods which are Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Advertising (Pay Per Click), and Paid Inclusion that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site. Let's discuss each method in detail.

Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the art and science of making web pages attractive to the search engines. It is the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the SERPs. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater will be the chance for a site visited by a user. The better optimized the page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in SERPs. This is especially critical because most people who use search engines only look at the first page or two of the search results, so for a page to get high traffic from a search engine, it has to be listed in those first two pages. One of the things that search engine optimization specialists do is keep track of all the changes in operations so that they can optimize pages accordingly. They also keep up with changes in the different submission policies.

Search Engine Advertising: Search Engines show ads alongside search results. The search query determines which ads are shown. Advertisers pay a fee every time someone clicks on their ad (Pay Per Click), as opposed to traditional advertising where they pay for the number of impressions.

Paid Inclusion: In paid inclusion, a site owner pays a fee in order to have web pages included in a search engine's editorial listings. The major search engines offering such programs are usually emphatic. This payment does not provide any sort of good ranking. A new web site might submit their home page through a paid inclusion program in order to ensure that the page gets listed within a day or two, rather than the typical two-to-four weeks it might take for a crawler-based search engine to find the page naturally. Whether the site will rank well for a particular term will remain dependent on the various factors that search engines use to ordinarily rank web pages. Someone might have a page that changes often, such as with new products for sale. Paid inclusion would allow this page to be revisited on a regular basis rather than the common monthly schedule that most crawler-based search engines tend to follow. Paid inclusion was popular for a while, currently there are not many paid inclusion programs left.