Search Engine Marketing: An 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 (paying per click, etc.)

Search Engine Optimization & Registration (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 first 200-250 words of the main 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. Submission and registration to help the search engines find your pages is also important. This area has a number of different names, including Organic, Natural and PR style)

Paid-For Listings
These include bid listing providers (Overture and Espotting, etc.), along with "trusted feed" methods, where an XML content database is linked directly into a search engine's index. Pay-per-click campaigns can also include such programs as Google's AdWords and Looksmart Looklistings. 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 on it and index its pages within their databases. Each search engine of this type has proprietary algorithms that determine relevancy.

Manual Directories
This type of site, such as Yahoo's Directory is organized by people who evaluate relevancy by hand. Not really engines that search, these are more like yellow pages.

Paid-For Listing Services
Overture and Espotting have made popular bid-based results. You specify what you'll pay for a term. 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.