What is SEM?
SEM stands for ‘Search Engine Marketing’. It is an internet marketing strategy which combines the effectiveness of SEO, paid inclusions, pay per click program, page rank, contextual advertisement and link popularity to improve the number of visitors to a particular website. Sometimes people confuse about SEO and SEM and take it as one thing but it is absolutely wrong. SEO is a just a part of SEM strategy to increase the website visibility in search engine results. Search engine marketing is considered the fastest growing marketing type as compared to all traditional offline and online marketing strategies. Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing are included in top SEM vendors in online marketing arena. Though SEM is not as complicated as it seems to be but most of the marketers prefer to hire professional services of third party to maintain and manage their online marketing business.
If you are one of those persons who are interested to know about search engine marketing then you must continue reading the article as here we will describe all important aspects of SEM concisely to remove confusion about this useful marketing technique. Let’s have a look over important aspects of search engine marketing.
SEO:Search Engine Optimization
As we discussed earlier that SEO is an important part of SEM strategy. In SEO websites are optimized for certain keywords, quality backlinks are maintained for organic traffic and loopholes present in site structure are removed to increase the visibility of website in search results of major search engines.
Identifying Specific Keyword and Search Queries
Identifying the related keywords and search terms is imperative for site optimization, for this purpose various online tools are used to get the quality keywords which can really drive targeted audience towards a site. These tools include wordtracker and keyword discovery.
Moreover search term list are also used to get an idea about popular trends. Such tools can be useful when you are going to design a website and not getting an idea that which term will be useful in this regard. Search term list tools include lycos50, Livesuche and Top 500 keywords of the Week etc.
Site Submission
To get indexed by search engines websites are submitted to articles directories, major search engines, press release and news feeds. These techniques make the process easier to get site indexed by all major search engines. For submitting site to major search engines you can use following links.
Google Submission: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo Submission:https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
MSN Submission: http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
Link Popularity
Link popularity is the number of links coming to your site from anywhere of online world including article directories, websites, blogs or news feed etc. You can link popularity at http://www.marketleap.com/ easily. To get link popularity your site must have informative and accurate content to compel other sites to give links to your site.
Paid Inclusions
If you want to get your site indexed by search engine as soon as possible then you can use the strategy of paid inclusion. In this process you pay to search engines to index your site to their search databases. It is also called PFI (Pay for Inclusion) or PPI (Pay per Inclusion).
Pay per Click Programs
Another way to increase the traffic of your website is pay per click strategy in which you can use various affiliate programs to get quality traffic easily.
Analyze Log File to Improve SEM
Remember that log file of your website contain all information you need to know about promoting your site. So analyze the site and look how you can improve site ranking and what search terms are important to improve its rank and to get its targeted audience.
Google Page Rank
Page Rank is an important factor on the basis of which google index your site in its search results. The higher the page ranks the better visibility your page will get in search engine results. The number of inbound links and informative content are main factors to increase the page rank of any page.
