What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is essentially the tools that your business uses to get noticed on a search engine. It is NOT the same thing as Search Engine Optimisation, although many people will often confuse the two. There are many popular tools that are used in Search Engine Marketing, but anything that is utilised to increase the visibility of your web site can fall into this category. Within this category, there are four major tools that are provided to you by CMather, including: Contextual Advertising, Paid Inclusion, Paid Placement and Search Engine Optimisation.

There are other tools that you could use for your SEM needs, but these four are by far the most popular and useful of the tools that are available. Contextual advertising refers to advertising that is geared toward content of a specific type that is distributed throughout the internet and its search engines. If you’ve ever read a magazine, you can better understand contextual advertising. In each different magazine, ads are placed to target that specific reader group. For example, teen magazines will have ads geared toward teens, while celebrity magazines will have ads geared toward women ages 18-45, as this reader group is the most common for this type of magazine. Contextual advertising works the same way, but based on content rather than age groups.

Paid inclusion and paid placement are fairly simple topics to understand. They are the newest trend that has been created to be better than Pay-per-Click marketing (PPC), and are basically what they sound like. Whether you pay or not, your web site will eventually make it into the search engine results listings, but if you choose to pay an annual fee for inclusion you can guarantee that it is there when you need it to be. While this might not seem like a big deal, the time difference between free indexing and paid inclusion can easily be months. Paid placement will guarantee you an exact spot in search engine results, while inclusion will simply mean that you’re on the results at some point.

Search Engine Optimisation, the final tool of our offering of Search Engine Marketing tools, is a very simple tool to use. It involves researching popular keyword searches and then using those keywords to optimise your web site so that it is more search engine-friendly. All of these tools together can work to create a dynamic Search Engine Marketing campaign for any web site.