Search Engine Marketing
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is
a marketing method that employs Internet in facilitating a website's
recognition online by its occurrence in the first results of a search
engine.
The most popular search engines
marketers choose to make use of are:
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global search engines:
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Google
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Yahoo
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Bing
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Ask
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as well as local search engines like:
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Yandex(Russia)
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Rambler(Russia)
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Baidu(China)
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Onkosh(Middle East)
This type of marketing is basically
represented by two main elements:
1. Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
consists in managing and adapting the website so that it meets the
search engine requirement in order to be listed in the first sequence
of results.
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Keywords and Search Terms are some of the first and most important steps in SEO. Analyzing the words and phrases your target market uses in search engines, offers you a clear image of the keywords you should use when advertising your website. There can also be identified correlations between your possible customers' demand and certain events or periods of time that can lead to trends and patterns in your target market.
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Site design is crucial to your site's success. It is the first way you interface your market, the first impression, the point where you capture or lose potential customers' attention. There are many details to be considered, such as: domain name, keyword frequency and display, file formats, site structure, color scheme.
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Link building is increasing your popularity by having links to your site posted on other relevant sites. This improves your site ranking and conclusively, brings more visitors to you.Very important in this step is the quality of your site, the rank of the sites that link to you and the relevance of the partner site's topic in your business area.
2. Paid Search is a more
effective way of drawing traffic to your site. Compared to SEO, it is
much faster but involves a financial investment.
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Pay Per Click involves creating an advertising message that the search engine will display on sites relevant to your target market or related to your business. There is a fee you have to pay for each visitor that gets to your site through these ads.
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Paid Inclusion represents paying the search engine to display your advertisement on top of their results as a sponsored result and index some of your site pages faster that a usual crawler would.
But not just drawing traffic to your
site is the final goal of Search Engine Marketing, but attaining your
marketing objectives. The visitors have to do an action. Whether it
is buying a product, subscribing, signing up, downloading files or
voting for something, these are the results to be monitored and
attained through an efficient Search Engine Marketing strategy.