Search engine marketing (SEM)

Background

Having become the most visited online category ahead of the like of portals, social networks and Email, search engine marketing must be at the heart of your marketing efforts. The big three search engines by quite some margin are:

Search engine Global market share%

Google 81.57%

Yahoo! 10.07%

Microsoft* 4.71%

*MSN & Live Search

(Source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com  Feb 2009)

With 96% of the global market, it is pretty much a safe bet if you decide to focus your energy on those search engines alone.

Although Google claim 25% of searches each day have never been conducted before, there are three broad types of searches:

 Navigational e.g. typing in a brand name

 Informational e.g. "World Cup winner 1978"

 Transactional e.g. "iPod Nano"

A search engine results page (SERP) is made up of two distinct sections; organic results and sponsored results. A typical SERP looks like this:

We will now look at those two sections in more detail:

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation is the process of increasing your website’s organic position in a search engine’s ranking. There are two methods to achieve this; ‘On site’ and ‘Off site’.

On-site SEO

On-site deals with all the variables you can control as the site’s webmaster. These are primarily based around your use of keywords:

Researching keywords

Choosing the right keywords to focus on can be the difference between being ranked highly for the most popular terms and being buried on page 3 or below. There are numerous keyword research tools to choose from, some paid and some free. Unless you have a site running in to hundreds of pages or you have a product inventory the size of Amazon’s, the free tools will be enough.