Search Engine Marketing Fundamentals and How to Utilize SEM

“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising”. ~Mark Twain

No truer words have ever been spoken than Mark Twain’s take on advertising. If ever there could be a truer statement for Internet marketing, I would be surprised. The fact is that I have seen tiny Websites by individuals who are brand new to Internet marketing take the right approach to marketing (advertising) their Website, and watched their new business explode with success; and one of the main initiatives these small Website owners have used is Search Engine Marketing. Taking the time to learn about search engine marketing (SEM) fundamentals and how to utilize SEM to promote your business, organization or personal brand is one of the very most important aspects of Internet marketing that you can learn. Search engine marketing includes several aspects of promoting your business, so learning how to ustilize SEM by applying search engine marketing fundamentals is well worth your time if you want ot be successful online.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) incompasses several marketing disciplines that all serve to expose a Website to as many potential customers or followers as possible. It is a broad term, but the various disciplines found within its definition are many and very specific in their function and how they affect the traffic that a Website receives. This increased traffic is directly related to search engine result pages (SERPs). Although SEM includes natural or organic SERPs; SEM is most often associated with paid search results. Paid search results is often times referred to as Pay Per Click advertising (PPC).

While I personally believe that you can have equal if not greater long term results through organic search engine results, there is a place for PPC in the promotion of a Website IF you have a great deal of competition. While SERP is free to those who are willing to work at building their page rankings with major search engines, it is VERY competitive. Another drawback to SERP (search engine result pages) is that unless you are very articulate in how you go about using organic search engine results, most find this method to not be as targeted and requires aa bit longer to see results. In most cases you can expect to see organic traffic efforts take 3 to 6 months to see direct benefits.

One particular coaching project of mine was an IT worker in Philippines. When he first got his main website up, his Alexa ranking (traffic ranking) was at just over 20,500,000 in world rankings. That was 4 months ago. I provided him with some articles that were search engine optimized and once they were indexed, within the last four months, his Alexa rankings went from 20,500,00+ to just at 1,100,000 – an increase in rankings by over 19,000,000 Websites worldwide. His rankings for his Website in his home country skyrocketed as well from somewhere in the 1,500,000 range to 21,000, in the same time period. What this means is that his site is generating enormously more traffic than it was before, i.e. 20 time more, and he did not have to pay a thing for this traffic.

For those of you that are really new to Internet marketing, let me clarify the difference between the term ‘organic’ and ‘PPC’ search results. When you hear the term organic search results it refers to your website being found by those searching for information that your Website has to offer. This means that your article has been ranked high enough in search engines to get noticed by those looking for information on the subject that your article or post is about. When you hear the term ‘paid search’ or PPC, it means that the person using PPC or paid search results is having to pay a fee every time someone clicks on an ad appearing in a search engine result page and is redirected to your Website.

This PPC fee is typically based on the popularity of the key words you select to be ranked by search engines for or includes advertisements that are typically to the top or side of search engine page rankings. This most often takes place through a bidding process where you bid how much you are willing to pay for a search result or a placed advertisement on a popular page (based on the amount of traffic that page receives). In a nutshell, the higher the bid for a specific keyword is, and the more appeal your advertisement has, the higher ranked your site will get for the money you pay per cliick.