Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

 

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the marketing of an internet website by increasing it's visibility in search engines or (SERPS) by utilizing search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement on search engines (PPC), contextual advertising, videos. social media, and paid inclusion. Search Engine Marketing or SEM starts by developing a solid foundation thru the strategic use of on page factors to help drive site traffic.

 

One factor is keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that are less competitive and easier for an SEO to rank. This criteria is critical for new website owners to understand in the early stages of development as it helps in laying the foundation for a successful site. The initial use of keywords that are less competitive (known as long tail keywords) helps to get your new website going, and while they may not draw much traffic, they do convert better for a particular product, service or niche. Mature web sites that have been online a number or years can expand their keywords to include more competitive terms that draw more visitors, but don't convert as well as the less competitive long tail keywords do. More on keywords. More on Keywords.

 

The next factor to consider is optimizing your websites content to take advantage of the important keywords you are strategically placing within your site content. It is important that you skillfully write your website content in a manner to market your company effectively, using your keyword phrases in a well placed and relevant fashion. After you have completed optimizing the content on your website your focus needs to turn to website structure. How do I organize the content so that not only can visitors find it, but search engine spiders can crawl and index this important content on your website? By using your keyword phrases relevantly in page title tags, heading tags, directory names, file names, alt tags, and meta tags you allow the search engine spiders to accomplish their goal, thus helping to maximize your sites visibility to the search engine.

 

There are 3 meta tags. Title, Keyword, and Description.

 

Matt Cutts in a Short Video Covering Some Common Sense SEM/SEO

The Title tag should be kept between 60 - 90 characters, relevant to the page content, include keyword phrases, and company name. Title tags are very important so writing good title tags is a must.

 

The Keyword meta tag is not as important today as it was and some search engines have dropped any site factoring from The algo. this is were you can add specific keywords that the page is trying to rank for.

 

The Description meta tag is very important because this will show up in the search results below your link, providing a great opportunity for you to entice the searcher to visit your website. This is an accurate description of what the content on the page covers so it is very important this be accurate to reflect the content within the page.

 

Web sites that naturally appear high in search engine results typically have maximized their SEO methods, by using:

Relevant and unique title tags on all Web pages;

Succinct meta tag content descriptions;

Header tags (specifically h1 tags) within the content;

Text navigation links;

XML Sitemaps; and, Robots.txt files

 

Continued SEM Material