Search engine marketing
Online Advertising
Search engine marketing
In
Internet marketing, search engine marketing, or SEM,
is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in
search engine results pages (SERPs). The three main methods are:
-
Search engine optimization, or improving rankings for relevant
keywords in search results by rectifying the website structure, and content
such that they could be easly read and understood by the search engine's
software programs. It is seen that website containing the latest trends and
updates are first available to the visitor.
- Search engine advertising, or paying the search engine company
for a guaranteed high ranking or an ad displayed aside the results (commonly
known as
pay per click advertising).
-
Paid inclusion, or paying the search engine company for a guarantee
that the website is included in their natural search index.
Search engine marketers are experts and firms who explore of weaknesses and
strengths in the methods and individual products to find the best way to promote
a particular website in search engines.
Methods
Search engine optimization
- Main article:
search engine optimization
Search engine optimization aims to index and improve rankings for the
webpages which are most relevant to the keywords searched for according to the
algorithm of each search engine. The relevant pages are returned in search
engine result pages(SERPS). Basically this is done by writing a naural copy of
each page containing the keywords that genuinely represent the goods and the
services described within the corresponding webpages. Keywords are also used in
the Title Pages, Meta Tags, Headings within a density of about 6% i.e., about 6
keywords spread over a page containing 100 words.
In order to further fine tune the pages and keep them user and search engine
friendly, the architecture of the website, including its internal link
structure, navigation etc., are also suitably modified for human beings and
search spiders to nevigate through whole wbsite pages. Search spiders then can
scan all necessary data about the whole site and store in engines' data base. A
good navigation systems imparts excellent experience to the users and they tend
to visit the site again and again. This a sign of good achievement.
Numbers of inbound links to the site and the 'quality' of the links determine
the Reputation of the website within the industry it belong to. This Reputation
is one of the most important criteria for search engines to consider higher
levels of rank to the deserving webpages. Algorithms are evolutionary and
strives to develop every day in an attempt to provide most relevant & useful
pages to the users and strike out the websites that trick them and attain higher
positions for a while.
These processes are known as Organic or Algorithmic Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) of websites. Eventually it is essential for each and every
website to get optimized organically, though temprarity they can make use of
Pay-per-Click (PPC) to market their website without having to wait for the
results of Organic SEO. However, users still prefer Organic Result Pages than
Pages for which Advertising charges are paid to search engines. So far for
inclusion in Organic Result Pages no fees are prescribed except the high
usefulness of the information to the users.
Search engine advertising
Advertising with search engines is known by different names. It is also
called sponsored search. Advertising with search engines could be further
classified as follows:
- Advertising based on a keyword search
- Advertising based on a keyword search could take place through a search
engine such as google.com, or a search engine partner site, such as
shopping.com. For example, Google
offers a service called
AdWords,
which allows companies, for a small fee, to have a link to their website
featured when a user searches a specific keyword which the company
specified.
- Advertising based on content context
- Many search engines (e.g. Google,
Yahoo! Search) have partner websites with specific content. The websites
agree to let the search engines place content-specific advertising on their
website, in return for a fee. The search engine then finds companies
interested in advertising on websites with their desired content. For
example, an online dog food retailer might have their advertisement placed
on a site about dogs.
Both of these advertising formats allow advertisers to target specific users
with certain interests. Generally these advertisements are paid for based on
either a
pay
per click campaign or an impression based campaign.
Paid inclusion
- Main article:
paid inclusion
Search engines use
computer programs called spiders or web crawlers to automatically discover websites and catalog their content. As
this process can take some time and requires a website to be linked to from
another website (to allow the crawler to find it), most search engines except
for Google provide another channel to be included in search rankings via paying.
This is different from pay per click advertising because the inclusion is
guaranteed but not placement.
Ethical considerations
Many forms of search engine optimization only amount to ensuring compliance
to search engines' guidelines for inclusion and removing any technical barriers
that might keep the website from reaching a proper ranking. However, other
methods of search engine optimization such as
keyword spamming are often viewed as "gaming the system" and considered
unethical. See the article on
search engine optimization for details.
Displaying advertisements or sponsored results in an area visually separated
from the algorithmically determined results is generally considered ethical.
However, some search engines allow the ranking of a website to be influenced
with a payment and provide little or no indication to the
end-user
that this has happened. Since the search engines give the impression or claim
that the rankings reflect the relevance or popularity of the websites, this is
often seen unfair or deceptive.
Search engine advertising products that don't guarantee a specific ranking or
an amount of visibility are seen as unethical by some search engine marketers.
The product might provide an unspecified "boost" or the final ranking or
visibility might be a result of an auction.
Paid inclusion has not caused much concern. However, it has been suggested
that search engines should improve the speed they pick up new websites and that
paid inclusion services thus create a conflict of interest that discourages
improving service levels across the board.
Products
External Articles
Organizations
Industry resources
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This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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