Search Engines Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a particular kind of Internet marketing that involves the attempt to promote a website by increasing its visibility in the popular search engines. These search engine result pages (SERPs) can bring a lot of traffic to a website, and so a high visibility in them is very valuable from a marketing perspective.
Search engine marketing is defined as either the method of buying a search listing through one of the relevant search engine advertising tools, normally Google, Yahoo and MSN; or can also be defined in relation to other methods such as search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a big topic all of its own and has a number of ethical considerations, however paid placement is fairly straightforward and is implemented in all three major search engines.
The normal paid placement model uses an advertising method called pay-per-click, where an advertiser only has to pay when the Internet user has clicked directly on the advertisement. This is great from an advertisers perspective as it offers them a targeted audience who have already entered into a dialogue with their company through the act of clicking.
All three leading search engines have an advertising product that is based on this model. The Google product is called Adwords, the others are known as Yahoo Search Marketing and the MSN adCentre. Almost any online marketing campaign that is past a certain size will include one or more of these advertising methods into its overall efforts. These models are all rather similar regardless of who is providing them.
Pay-per-click advertising works through a bidding system where the advertisers bid on keywords that are relevant to their target market. An advertiser wants their product to be linked to a certain phrase or a particular context and will pay accordingly. Some keyword phrases will have relatively low bids and others will have high bids depending on the perceived value of how much an ad is worth for a company.
Search engine marketing that is achieved through pay-per-click advertising can be split into two major categories. Either an ad is matched to a specific keyword and is placed on the actual search engine page or it is matched to a certain content matter and is displayed on a third party page that has relevant content for the advertiser. This technique of advertising is really revolutionary as it offers an unprecedented level of control and targeting to an advertiser.
If many different advertisers are bidding on a certain keyword then another consideration comes into play, that of a ‘quality score’. This is a number that is based on many things including the previous click through rate, relevance of ad text and keywords, the history of the advertiser and the quality and relevance of the landing page. The search engines provide these quality controls to try and keep ads relevant to the context of the page that they will be displayed in.