Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the result pages for searches made by internauts. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (way back when), SEM methods include:

• search engine optimization (or SEO)
• paid advertisement
• paid inclusion.

These days Search engine marketing includes creating HubPages, squidoo lens, uploading files to scribd, article submission with links back to your primary sales site, blog entries, audio and video submissions and so many more.

Paid search advertising has many controversies about it, especially since sites like Baidu and Yandex (both with more daily searches than MSN) like to include paid links and natural links in the same results. By some standards this is not an appropriate practice, but one country can not force its standards on the world, so this is going to stay. Rumor on the street says that Google will be including a mix of SERP's with a mix of primarily natural results with advertised sites added in and not marked as such.

Search engine marketing is a topic that can be studied for months and still be a total waste of time. By the time you learn the tricks that are working - they no longer work. Each person should make the effort to find what works for them and use that method until it stops working.

It is easy to get a web site in the top 10 listing on Google, or at least I have done it for my clients over the last 6 months. Time for my method to stop working, so I am out trying new things - knowing that day will come.