What is SEM (Search Engine Marketing)?

SEM is search engine marketing and it encompasses several other advertising methods, like SEO, paid inclusion, and contextual advertising. There are great many benefits to SEM advertising. Ensuring a place in the top of the search results is akin to naming the company with several A's to ensure beginning placement in the phone book. People are more apt to click on the first few results or call the first few phone book entries, so proper placement is paramount to increasing sales and driving traffic to a website.

Major SEM Tools - Keyword Research and Analysis

Keyword research is simple. Research to find the most relevant and commonly used keywords used when consumers search for a type of product/service. Use those terms and keywords in the content of the website, including headings and subheadings. As long as the search engine indexes websites, the use of keywords should bump up the website in the results page.

Major SEM Tools - Website Saturation and Popularity

Saturation is the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine. Popularity is the number of times the site is linked to by other websites. These two combine to make a website easier to find because of the level of exposure. Most search engines tally link popularity in their ranking algorithms, so the more links, the better.

Major SEM Tools - Back End Tools

These tools, like Web analytic tools and HTML validators, help website owners understand what is happing on the website and measure the website's success. Each tool measures different aspects of the website's performance, so it is common to utilize more than one back end tool to get a more complete picture of how the website is performing.

Subcategories of SEM

SEM is the umbrella under which there are more specific ways to increase website exposure. SEO, or search engine optimization, optimizes the content of a website with respect to keywords and terms that people often use to search a search engine. This maximizes the chances that the website will show up in the search engine's results.

Social Media Marketing, or SMM, is a marketing tool that utilizes social media sites to influence consumers to purchase products or services. This is a natural extension of the SEM work done with websites, but its application is directed toward social media sites. Search engine marketing management (SEMM) takes the theories and practices behind SEO and applies them to social media. However, SEMM focuses more on ROI as opposed to building traffic as this is a more logical means of measuring the effectiveness of SEMM methods.