Search Engine Marketing 101

In the world of the Internet, companies use a myriad of tactics to gain the edge over competitors, to reach the largest possible audience for their products, or target potential customers in a cost-effective way. One of the most efficient ways of doing this is by increasing their presence on SERPS (search engine result pages) to promote their websites. As well as this search engine optimization, they make extensive use of paid inclusion, contextual advertising and paid placement, and such tactics come under the umbrella term of search engine marketing (SEM).

With paid inclusion, a search engine company makes a charge for including websites in their search index. This is also known as sponsored listings, and as well as acting as a safeguard against illegitimate listings it also generates profit. The webpage in question will be catalogued regularly and there will be a yearly subscription for inclusion of the page in the index. Not many sites rely solely on paid inclusion. Yahoo for instance mixes paid inclusion, per-click and web-crawling results. The line between per-click and paid inclusion is somewhat shady.

Contextual advertising is targeted advertising, where adverts appear for example in a mobile browser, where and when they appear being dependent on the content the user is currently viewing, with automatic systems doing the selecting. So for example if you are conducting a search on car prices you will find numerous adverts springing up about special deals in the motor industry, that wouldn’t appear if you were browsing baby products. Contextual advertising involves the system scanning for keywords in a website and returning adverts related to the content being viewed, as in the example.

In the case of paid placement, this can be subsumed under pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-click (CPC). With PPC, payment is only made to the host website by an advertiser when their advert has been clicked, rather than have a monthly fee or other arrangement. In the case of search engines, there is usually a bidding system in operation, where bids are made on keyword phrases that are intimately associated with the target market; for content sites, the rate is usually fixed. CPC is the actual sum an advertiser pays, whether to a search engine or some other internet publisher, whenever the advert is clicked once.

Search engine marketing is big business, with advertisers in the US spending $13.5 billion on this strategy in 2008 alone. As in any complex system such as insurance, mortgages and banking, as well as other forms of advertising, agencies have sprung up to do the legwork – at a price – for advertisers who know what they want in the way of SEM strategies for their businesses but do not appreciate the complexities of implementation.

A number of reports and studies have looked into the ethical aspects of search engine marketing, with ongoing controversy surrounding the ways in which search engines present marketing materials in their search results, and the issue of trademark infringement.