Search Engine Marketing has been a mystical science which only professional consultants or agencies can offer. To be honest, it’s not that easy, but if you know some basics, you’ll be able to achieve first worthwhile results.
First of all: What kind of SEM is out there?
1. Organic search
This is the possibility to improve your homepage regarding content, tags, etc. to let the crawlers search your homepage. If you have done a good job, you’ll be listed at the top of search engines candidate list. This is maybe the most expensive means in SEM. On the other hand, while paid placement and directories are only useful as long as you pay, to improve your homepages content may result in sustainable outcome. But don’t underestimate the required effort you have to put into homepage optimization. Especially if your homepage is huge or it’s based on ancient technology.
Search Engine Marketing - Organic Search
2. Directory listings
Directory listings are one of the most neglected possibilities in SEM. These are paid directories which are maintained by human editors which put your company into some directories (e.g. Financial services etc. ). The power of directories is the fact, that this external link which is refering to your page is mostly high ranked at Google, Yahoo! etc. As you might know, the higher the rank of a external page linking to your page is, the better it is for your organic search. It’s often a very cheap way to get good organic search results without having changed your homepages content.
(Open directory or Yahoo directory)
3. Paid placement
This is what most of you know as Google Adwords. It’s in fact paid advertisement on search engines. The highest bid will be displayed when you are searching for anything. This is maybe the most effective choice if your homepages content isn’t optimized or you don’t want to change anything on your page so far. It’s just like that: Pay a certain amount for your keyword to be linked with your homepage. For example, if you bid on the keyword „fitness“ the highest amount, then your Fitness club URL will appear on the top of the search engines candidate list. Mostly paid placement is marked as: „Sponsored link“.
Search Engine Marketing - Paid Placement
So right now you know about 3 means of SEM. As this is the first part of a series, you’ll get some more information about organic search with my next blog entry.
Stay tuned, you’ll be soon a SEM professional :-).
The idea pertaining to search engine marketing is to gain attention from the index spiders embedded within Google, Yahoo! and MSN. These specific web sites use their methodological software to find, search, and level the content of relevant websites for browser purposes. Many small and large businesses have introduced search engine marketing into their marketing plans because the internet holds unlimited potential for acquiring new customers.
I absolutely agree. This has been the major key why SEM is a hot trend. A company which cannot be found through the major search engine is kind of lost.