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What is Search Engine Marketing?

Tools for Building your Business Online

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process and strategy of using search engine results as an advertising vehicle. This may include improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings, or a combination of methods all designed to increase visibility, clicks and, of course, leads and orders. Search Engine Marketing involves balancing a number of different work streams including Search Engine Optimization, Advertising Campaigns (pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, or pay-per-performance) and Paid Listings.

The Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing industries have changed greatly over the last few years. Some highlights of the current state of the art are:
  • Search engines publicly acknowledge penalizing marketers that do not adhere to recommended best practices
  • Search engines are attempting to better engage marketers and developers
  • Everything can and should be measured, including traffic, bid costs, conversion rates, keyword effectiveness, geographic targeting, etc.
  • Web Usability and Web Accessibility are emerging as influential topics in search engine marketing
  • Content is important, and so is a strong link network
  • It is easy to accidentally penalize your website ranking on a search engine results page (SERP).
  • Different search engines are used by different demographics
  • Many search engines feed off each other's databases, and crawl each other's advertisements
  • With SEM, unlike with a lot of conventional advertising options, everything can and should return to an ROI calculation
  • The success of your SEM initiatives relies on the sophistication and foundation of your own website, as much as your marketing efforts.
The key to effective search engine marketing is to put together the best combination of SEM strategies for a given business, without crossing the line into unethical practices that can backfire and result in black listing by search engines.

Wikipedia offers the following summary of some of the ethical considerations of SEM:

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 "black-hat techniques" or "gaming the system" and considered unethical... 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 as 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 at which they pick up new websites and that paid inclusion services thus create a conflict of interest that discourages improving service levels across the board.

Whether you are looking to build your own business, or you want to help your clients make the most effective use of their web presence, a sound knowledge of (ethical) search engine marketing techniques will help.
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