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Search engine marketing (SEM) is widely used to refer to a business’ online marketing strategy, to promote their web site, products and/or services by improving its visibility and availability on search engines. The term underpins the tactics performed in SEM designed to promote leads and sales from search engines.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is widely used to refer to a business’ online marketing strategy, to promote their web site, products and/or services by improving its visibility and availability on search engines. The term underpins the tactics performed in SEM designed to promote leads and sales from search engines.

SEM or SEO?

From a webmaster’s perspective, SEM refers to paid advertising programs; as an extension of an SEO campaign. SEO in itself refers to on-site and off-site optimisation to achieve higher, natural search engine positioning. However, from a client’s perspective, SEO can be seen as part of an online marketing strategy – often resulting in confusion.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and SEM can be seen as two very different things – whist you pay for visibility in PPC programs, SEO is responsible for your natural search engine positioning. Visit SEO Gibraltar for more details on SEO tactics to improve natural search engine positioning.

SEM Programs:

The major search engine marketing vendors are of course the big players in the search engine market: dominated by Google and its Adwords program, but SEM is also important on other search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing. Search engine marketing has over the years proved to be a more efficient marketing tool than traditional forms of advertising, with the growth of e-commerce and online security.

Search engine marketing involves a array of complex technologies and marketing theory, ultimately leading to the rise of many secondary specialising in SEM rather than SEO, and vice-versa.

With the explosion of the web, the value of search engine marketing has naturally flourished. People have started relying on search engines more and more to get the desired information on the products or services they need, leading to a rise in businesses relying on pay-per-click (PPC) programs. Paid advertising programs such as these can be a very effective way of targeting your customers accurately, but PPC is not a substitute for SEO – not by a long shot!

SEO and search engines

Keyword mining is one of the most important on page aspects of the SEO. The idea is to form correct words and phrases which search engine users are likely to use, enabling the site to rank higher in the search engines. But the going gets tricky later as the words used by the user may get common, which is what happened in the early days of search engines. This saw search engines adapt their algorithms to rank web site popularity using other factors, namely link popularity – link building. Strategic link building is one of the most important aspect of search engine marketing, perhaps the holy grail of SEO today, but with search engines becoming increasingly sophisticated, the value of link building appears to be waning somewhat. Search engines are now placing much more weighting towards social networking sources as an indicator of link popularity, as the past decade has seen a rise in mass link building as the most prevalent SEO tactic.

The question is, given the large number of link building agencies available online now offering social bookmarking services, is it now, again, a matter of time before search engines become that little bit smarter to differentiate between the natural popularly of your web site, and it’s “paid popularity”.

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Dyron Wilkie is the author of this article, and writer for SEO Gibraltar. Find more information about search engine optimisation here.