Search Engine Marketing

From Search Engine SEO SEM

Search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

How Search Engine Marketing Works

Each type of listing -- organic and paid -- has a type of marketing approach associated with it.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves optimizing either new websites, or existing websites, so that they rank highly in a search engine's organic listings when users search on keywords that are related to the site's content.

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.

In order to place an ad for a specific search engine, you need to open an account with the advertising product of that search engine (e.g. Google AdWords). After opening an account, you then create your ad and enter a list of keywords usually queried by users that can trigger your ad to be shown on the search engine results page.

Ads on most search engines operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. That means you pay only when a user clicks your ad, and not for the ad impression made on the search results page. Another common pricing model in online advertising is cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), in which you pay per impression made on the search engine results page, not for any clicks on your ad.