Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a type of Internet marketing strategy that helps to promote a website by improving its visibility in search engines. SEM employs a host of techniques such as SEO, paid placement & paid inclusion and also contextual advertising.

The major SEM vendors that are together responsible for the largest chunk of SEM are Google AdWords, Yahoo! and Microsoft adCenter. Since the year 2006, SEM has been growing at a rate much faster than traditional mode of advertising. It has also surpassed other modes of online marketing.

SEM often involves a set of complex technologies. This has given rise to a secondary agency offering search marketing services. Many marketing professionals fail to comprehend the intricacies of SEM and prefer to rely on a third party agency to manage their search marketing campaigns.

With the growing number of websites across the web, the importance of SE have also grown to help people get the desired information speedily. A search engine relies upon a business model where they manage funds through their services like Pay Per Click (PPC) programs. For example, Yahoo! now offers paid search options to the advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google AdWords program is also a preferred advertisement option on search results pages. Today, Pay Per Click programs are the primary money earning proposition for major search engines. The market is primarily dominated by Google and hence in 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced their plan to form an alliance.

SEM consultants offer to help websites to employ the promotion opportunities offered by SE. There are several agencies that focus mainly on marketing and promotion campaigns that are run on search engines. SEM covers the entire range of activities including SEO campaigns, paid listing management at the search engines and submission of websites to web directories. In this manner, it emphasizes upon developing online promotion strategies that can help businesses and individuals.

In recent times, SEM Management has also emerged as a specified segment that covers all activities including SEO but stresses more on return on investment (ROI) rather than managing web traffic.