What is Search Engine Marketing
If you’re an advertiser, you probably know already that your visibility in search engine results pages (SERP) is of vital importance. What good is a website if nobody knows about it and you’re not getting users visiting it? E-commerce is a numbers game; it’s just a given that if your products and services are worthwhile, you’re going to get a lot better sales (”conversions”) if you have more people actually visiting the site to check you out.
SEM, then, aims to fine-tune your SERP standing by:
- Using search (SEO) strategies)
- Using paid placement and paid inclusion
- Using Mobile Advertising
We’ll discuss all of these ideas one by one.
Back in those long-gone stone-age days of the Internet (the mid- to late-1990s), search engines began to appear, as indexes that would help people find information, products or services quickly. It wasn’t long before business models began to evolve around search engines (as ways to actually finance their presence and services), with the first pay per click programs being developed by Open Text in the mid-90s. Between then and now, pay-per-click (PPC) has proved to be the primary money maker for search engine companies. Search engine marketing, then, has evolved to become an over-arching term that takes in several facets of Internet marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
Google, Yahoo and Bing have a set of 200 or so factors that affect page rank for a website. Much of what goes into their algorithms and the parameters for search engine results is fairly secretive, and the companies keep changing and scrambling some of these factors a few times a year (so that unscrupulous webmasters can’t figure out ways to “game the system” and manipulate the various factors to get page ranks that are unfairly high). What SEO experts do agree on, though, is that the following are all…
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