A Quick Guide to Search Engine Marketing

Want a massive amount of web traffic coming to your website each day? One of the best ways to generate such traffic is via search engine marketing. Search engine marketing, also known as "SEM" or simply search marketing is about attracting people who search on particular words ("keywords") and phrases ("key phrases") in the search engines to visit your website. Don't worry - it's not as scary as it might sound!

Well-known search engines display both free (also known as "natural" or "organic") results and paid results when someone uses them to look for something. Each result contains some text (or in some paid advertising, a image) that supposedly indicates the nature of the relevant web page, as well as a link to that page. The paid advertisements can be specifically written to advertise a given web page (i.e. landing page), while the free results usually incorporate the description "tag" or specific text from the relevant web page. As a marketer, you main goal is to have your web pages appear in the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) when your target searches on words related to your products, services or website content.

In most cases, running an effective search engine marketing effort means having your listing appear at the top of the organic results, which appear on the left-hand side of the pages of the major search engines. However, it may be just as beneficial to have your ad appear in the first few listings in the paid results too. These appear on the right hand side of the pages of the major search engines. At the very least you want to be on the first page of results. And that, in a nutshell, is one of the major aims of search engine marketing.

The search engines depict two sets of results - "organic" results and paid results. The organic results are based on the search engine's "opinion" of the relevance of various websites (or, more accurately, web pages) in relation to certain keywords. The paid results are essentially ads that companies have paid for. Since no one exactly knows how each search engine determines the relevance of a website, optimizing a site for the search engines - or "search engine optimization" (SEO) - can be quite challenging.

Accomplishing a superior listing in the paid results is much more straightforward. For most SEs, the more you're willing to pay, the higher your listing. Having said that, Google's formula for determining the order of the results in its paid listings - known as Google Adwords - also incorporates your click through rate. The more people click on your listing, the higher the click through rate, which in turn, raises your place in the order. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can pay every time someone clicks on your listing or pay on the basis of how many times your ad is displayed.

Paid advertising, in particular pay-per-click, is a good way to get started in search engine marketing as you can limit how much you spend, while testing whether you have an offer, product or service worth promoting. You can also test keywords, ad copy and landing pages that can all assist you when it comes to search engine optimization.

Some Internet marketers believe SEM is difficult or "technical". But, in reality, becoming adept at SEM is largely a matter of learning the various strategies, testing different approaches, and putting in some work. The reward - lots of traffic and customers - certainly justifies the effort!

Steve Renner is a well known Internet Marketing Expert, author, consultant and speaker. Get Professional Internet Marketing training and resources at imtrain.com