Search engine marketing is the term used to describe the promotion and advertising that generates traffic from search engines. Marketing websites through search engines allows you to generate qualified traffic, this is because people have already entered a criteria in the search engine. The entered criteria are queried against the search engine database and the relevant websites will be displayed.
The Wikipedia definition of Marketing is:
“Marketing is an ongoing process of planning and executing the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion, often referred to as the 4 Ps) of products, services, or ideas to create exchange between individuals and organizations.”
Interestingly, Wikipedia references the four new P’s that are now more common due to technology having such a strong impact. These new P’s are:
- Personalization – where people now receive marketing messages that are specifically targeted to their needs.
- Participation: When the people who use the brand are participating with a real experience that is associated with the brand.
- Peer-to-Peer: Consumers can now interact with other consumers, discussing and recommending brands they trust and have used. The messages created by the big brands may not be as strong as they used to be, the Internet allows an open platform for the consumer’s message to come through.
- Predictive modeling: Predict consumer outcomes from actions taken with marketing activity.
In the cut-throat world of Internet business, one of the most important considerations is how to attract visitors to your website. It could have the most exciting and original content, the most innovative approach, and the best features of any site, but if no one knows the site exists, it won’t do any good.
One of the key factors to being successful online is having your website rank well on popular search engines and effectively advertising your products or services. The term search engine marketing (SEM) was originally used to describe paid visibility within search engines. It has now become a catch-all term to describe search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. It covers all the activities that involve marketing your website to generate more visitors to the site.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of matching your content to how you want to be found. This may involve writing keywords or meta tags with keyword lists and other more subtle tweaks. There are two things to keep in mind with SEO:
You can’t control exactly what people will search for, and therefore you can’t control exactly what the user will find. This means that you cannot decide in advance which of your pages will get the most visits.
There are no ongoing costs involved, just the initial outlay of optimizing your website content.
There has been some controversy surrounding certain SEO practices, some of which make the content of a website very unclear or full of spam. Major search engines will penalize a website for excessive use of bad SEO practices. If you choose SEO, make sure you get someone who really knows what they’re doing or you may end up with negative search engine ranking results.
pay per click advertising
With pay-per-click advertising, you get ad space on a website and pay only when someone clicks on the link. While this can lead to increased traffic to your website and increased sales, you need to make sure the provider you choose has adequate protections against “click fraud.”
Another form of PPC advertising comes in the form of search engine services like Google AdWords. This gives you not only paid inclusion in search engine results, but also advertising on a variety of subscriber sites. You can even use image, banner and video ads with this method.
PPC marketing is one of the most flexible internet marketing methods available, compared to other website marketing techniques, it provides instant and targeted results to drive your customer inquiries.
From outsourcing your PPC management to a PPC consultant or internet marketing organization, you can benefit from the experience and qualifications of experts to deliver the best possible pay per click results.
Other methods
There are other ways to advertise online, such as buying ad space for your banner or video ads on popular websites. Some will offer an advertising model where you pay for space rather than clicks. Other online marketing methods offer pay-per-impressions, where you pay for a predefined number of impressions that your ad will show to potential customers. This can be very effective if the ad is placed on a free website.