Search Engine Marketing Explained
Written by Kyle Pearce on September 29, 2009
North Americans spend more time on the Internet than watching Television, making over 1 billion internet searches a day. 8x Greater ROI of Internet Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising Methods (Sources: TNS, SEMPO, Jupiter)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the art and science of rank well and driving effective traffic from search engines. There are two main areas of Search Engine Marketing: Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search Engine Marketing.
Organic Search Engine Optimization
In Organic Search Engine Optimization the focus is on optimizing a website’s code, structure, internal links and content so that its pages will rank well on search engines. To make a website more effective in delivering traffic from search engines, the HTML code is cleaned up, the structure is mapped out in an effective way that search engines recognize and internal links point toward important pages on the website.
For optimizing the content, keyword analyzing tools are used to see which keywords should be targeted to drive traffic related to your website’s business. This is a very important part of Organic SEO because choosing and targeting the right keywords can make the difference between a website getting ten visitors a day or thousands. The writing style should be clear, informative but also conversational and delivered in such a manner that users can easily scan the content.
Achieving a higher rate of traffic through Organic SEO takes a lot of patience and expertise. Results tend not to be immediate but are geared toward a long-term strategy that consistently increasing traffic to a website.
Paid Search Engine Marketing
Paid Search Engine Marketing works to drive traffic to your website through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising with major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. These listings appear as text-based ads at the top, bottom and right of search engine listing and are clearly marked as “paid or sponsored” listings to distinguish them from the regular search results. You are only charged when someone clicks on your sponsored text link and is directed to your website.
These marketing campaigns are usually targeted toward specific keywords so it is essential that you research and analyze the right keywords that will drive business to your website. What you want to do is maximize your Return On Investment (ROI) from the money you are spending and you want convert the traffic you receive directly into clients or sales. To do this, you need to measure, analyze and constantly refine each Pay-Per-Click marketing campaign to achieve the best possible results.
While the traffic influx from Paid Search Engine Marketing is immediate, if you don’t do your research well, the money you spend can easily be wasted.
Related Topics:
- What Is Internet Marketing?
- How Search Engines Work
- Content Management Systems (CMS) Explained
- What Is S.E.O.?
- What Is Web Analytics?
- Internet Marketing Tools
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