Search Engine Marketing - What is it and how your company can benefit from it

In short, Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the marketing strategy of faster, more powerful, highly focused, dynamic and highly measurable and cost-effective and can give your business the ability to reach potential customers anywhere in the world at any time for only USD $ 0.05 the customer acquisition cost or even free!

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is about making sure that your website appears in the top 20 search results whenever you search for potential customers of any product and / or services you offer any of the major search engines like Google , Yahoo and MSN, which together represent over 90% of search engine traffic source.

Of course, there are other smaller search engines that focus on specialized industries such as Kayak (www.kayak.com Travel search engine) and country-specific search engines like Baidu (www.baidu. Com), which is very popular in China.

How popular are the search engines?

A study in November 2005 found that the number of people using Internet search engines to find information has skyrocketed in the last year, claiming a solid No. 2 spot behind e-mail as the most popular activity online. In 2003, 250 million searches are made daily on Google alone!

How it works

On the Internet, every time someone wants to find something, they use search engines. As spam continues to decrease the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool, search engine marketing is becoming the marketing strategy of choice for companies that want to reach a global audience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and either free or for only USD $ 0.05 per visitor. As the Internet becomes increasingly a part of our daily lives, the greater its role in helping businesses connect with their customers at that crucial moment in their buying decision process (when they are looking for it).

At this point, it is likely that there are people ... potential customers who are looking for any product or service you are offering any or all of the major search engines. When potential customers type in keywords that are looking for and press "Search", do they find you or your competitors instead?

How can you get your business to appear on search engines?

Of course, you must first have a website. If you do not have one, get one designed by someone who has a decent understanding of search engine optimization. I have met with business web sites are so poorly designed from an SEM perspective that not even he can find, even if you search the company name or business name in itself! Worse, their sites are designed in a way that prevents rather than facilitate their visitors to do business with them.

There are basically two ways to get your website appears in search engines. You get what appears in the "organic" or natural search results by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or launch a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign for the keywords you want your website to appear. Ideally, you should be doing both a PPC campaign can start driving highly qualified traffic to your website almost instantly, while you wait for your SEO campaign to gain momentum and get your website in top 20 SERPs (search results page), also known as "organic" or "natural" results search, which can take months to occur.

What is search engine optimization?

To get your website to appear in the SERPs you need to start an SEO campaign. The main problem with SEO is that it can be difficult and take several months to over a year before they can achieve good rankings and appear in the top 20 or top rankings of 2 pages of organic search results, that is all results that most people are willing to see before making a decision and choose what to visit Web site ultimately and do business. Have your website listed in the first 20 results will be a constant battle, especially if you are in a highly competitive industry and its competitors are also actively doing the same.

How your website is designed largely determines how well your search engine rankings will be. Love the lovely flash animation on your homepage? Miss! Bots can not see the Flash animation and are based almost exclusively on the text to determine the relevance and therefore the ranking of each Web page.