What is SEM?
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, can be looked at as “any activity to increase a website’s exposure in search engines.” As you may imagine, there are many activities that fall under this label- but don’t despair. The easiest way to organize SEM is by splitting these activities into two categories: SEO and PPC.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of adjusting and marketing a website to increase exposure and traffic in natural, or organic, search listings.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the practice of increasing a website’s exposure in paid, or sponsored, search listings.
What is SEM?
Search Engine Marketing and SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is half the battle in SEM. Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) defines SEO as the practice of editing a website’s content and code in order to improve visibility within one or more search engines. There are many different techniques a website owner or administrator can utilize to help increase their rankings in natural listings. SEO activities can also be divided into categories: on-site and off-site.
On-site SEO includes any changes you can apply to a website to increase its search engine friendliness. Some of these modifications include:
- Editing HTML titles, H1 tags, and content to include keywords that describe your product or service to the search engine and its visitors
- Writing keyword-rich metadata to accurately reflect the content that is visible to the search engine and its visitors
- Optimizing alt attribute tags for images to include keywords that describe your product or service
- Creating .xml and .html Sitemaps- Sitemaps are created so that humans and search engines can navigate your website. An HTML Sitemap provides a map for your human visitors. An XML Sitemap provides a map for search engine robots or spiders to enhance the search engine’s ability to crawl and index your site
- Changing hyperlinks to include quality anchor text- Anchor text is the words or phrases used to link to a page, and is a strong signal for search engines to determine a page’s relevance
- Editing site architecture or internal linking structure to enhance usability for visitors that enter through search engines
- Delete duplicate content and check for broken links/page errors- Duplicate content and crawling errors can affect your ability to rank well in search engines
Off-site SEO includes activities outside of what occurs on your site to help boost your search engine rankings. These techniques typically take time and effort, and off-site SEO is an ongoing process. Some of these search engine marketing activities include:
- Submitting your site/RSS Feed to relevant free and paid directories
- Soliciting links from related sites
- Social bookmarking
- Article and Press Release marketing
- Promoting through social networks
- Being an active forum member
One of the most important search engine marketing activities you will perform is link building, or building link popularity. When all of the top sites are properly optimized, how does a search engine ‘rank’ them? Essentially, links are the “currency” of the web. Each link acts as a ‘vote’ for a site, as far as the search engine sees it. Now, it should be said right away that more links doesn’t necessarily equal better ranking. The reigning cliché here is “quality over quantity.”
You may hear a lot when it comes to search engine marketing and link building, but always remember that it takes time. Some things to aim for when building link popularity for SEM:
- High PageRank
- Sites/pages that are extremely relevant to your website or the page being linked to
- Quality anchor text that is relevant and/or contains keywords
- Few other links
With this ‘voting’ system, there are plenty of ways to campaign for a vote, and you won’t always have control over the sites that link to you, the anchor text used or where your link is placed. The best links reside on high PageRank sites and are surrounded by relevant content, have few links on the page and use relevant anchor text. Each search engine counts these ‘votes’ differently, and therefore, your ranking might never be the same from one search engine to another.
Votes aren’t all alike, either. A link can have more value depending on the PageRank of a site, the number of links on that page, and whether or not the content is related. A link from IBM.com or Amazon.com will carry much more weight than unknown sites. 1 link among 5 will carry more weight than 1 link among 100. A link to a ‘save the turtles’ site from a blog post about the turtle life cycle will give more weight than the same link from a ‘going green’ blog post.
What you should learn about link popularity in respect to search engine marketing is that more, higher quality links will begin to raise your clout in the SERPs; thus giving you more exposure, higher traffic, more leads and more sales!
All of these SEO techniques, when combined, should effectively boost your website’s rankings in search engines. Although you won’t wake up a day later to own the number one spot in Bing, Google and Yahoo, you should see a steady rise as long as you keep on top of these search engine marketing activities. One thing to ultimately remember, though, is that pleasing the search engines is about pleasing the people. If you overdo it, your site may read like a technical volume written by a monkey. Search engines praise sites that make it easy for people to read and use.
Search Engine Marketing and PPC
Pay-Per-Click advertising is another form of SEM. SEMPO defines Pay-Per-Click Advertising as a model of online advertising in which advertisers pay only for each click on their ads. These ads direct searchers to a specified landing page on the advertiser’s website. Charges per click-through are based on advertiser bids in hybrid ad space auctions and are influenced by competitor bids, competition for keywords and search engines’ proprietary quality measure of advertiser ad and landing page content. (If that sounds confusing, just bear with me and it should start to make sense.) While it’s not necessary to participate in PPC, it’s an affordable, easy-to-manage form of search engine marketing. Also known as paid search advertising, PPC account structure can be broken down in this way: Main Account, Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword, Text Ads. Within each account you may have several campaigns, and within a campaign you may have several ad groups, within each ad group, several keywords and so on. This SEM technique works like this:
- Open an account with your selected search engine’s PPC program (AdWords for Google, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Microsoft adCenter)
- Build your account beginning with keyword research and round up related keywords together into keyword groups (or ad groups)
- Bid upon particular keywords relevant to your website using the search engine’s keyword tool
- Set targeting- Each search engine allows you to target by search or content. Search targeting means your ads will only appear in the search results located on the engine’s homepage. Content targeting means your ads will show up in articles, blogs or other websites that contain the keyword you are targeting
- Write relevant, keyword-rich text ads that center around your ad group- These ads are free until a searcher clicks on one
- Bids are entered into the search engine for your keyword, and the search engine displays your ads in their sponsored results section
- Each time a visitor clicks on your ad within the search engine, you are charged by the search engine
- Your ad positioning within the search engine’s sponsored listings is determined by your bid price, the quality score of your ad and the performance of your ad relative to the performance of your competitors’ ads
Pay-Per-Click ads allow advertisers to deliver targeted results within each of the search engines based upon the visitor’s search query. SEMPO defines a search query as the word or phrase a person types into a search field, which initiates search engine results page (SERP) listings. Utilizing advanced analytics and reporting with Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics or other third party tracking software allows advertisers to understand the behavior of the visitor by analyzing the origin of the search and the patterns of activity on your website. Each search engine has a graphical user interface (GUI) where you can adjust your campaigns keywords, text ads, bids, scheduling and more. You can choose to invest a small amount in PPC, which will enable you to test the keywords, ad text and conversion rates for your site before spending too much. Pay-Per-Click is an essential advertising medium for most verticals, especially when selling products. Most businesses find that utilizing this form of SEM is essential to their marketing campaigns. Find out more about Google AdWords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search and Microsoft adCenter to see what PPC solutions will work for your search engine marketing efforts.
Employing SEM Techniques
If this all sounds like technical mumbo-jumbo, don’t worry. SEM can be pretty complicated, and you won’t figure it all out at once. If you choose to conduct your search engine marketing yourself, there are plenty of resources online that will help you learn these techniques. It will take perseverance and patience, but you will learn valuable information that can help with any website. If you’re a busy person and simply need your site to work for you (rather than spending long hours working for it,) search engine marketing companies like SEM.com have professionals well-versed in each of these types of SEM, and can perform all of these functions for you.
If you’d like to conduct search engine marketing yourself, start with this SEO checklist, and try resources like SEOMoz.org, SEOBook.com and SEM Forums.
If you’d like help conducting search engine marketing, find out about the campaign choices that are best for you at SEM.com.