SEO & Search Engine Marketing

are a couple of the fastest growing form of online marketing.

It's really not a form... it essentially is the driving component behind most all online marketing.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines.

In order to create an advert for a given search engine, you have to create an account with the advertising product or branch of your search engine. 

For Google, this product is AdWords. After creating an account, you then create your ad and enter in a list of user search queries -- called "keywords" -- that can trigger your advert to be shown.

Ads on the majority of search engines operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, and therefore you pay only when a user clicks your ad, and not for the ad impression (the instance in which the ad shows up on the page).

Another typical pricing model in online advertising is cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), where you pay per impression, not for any clicks on your ad. Web owners frequently choose to advertise their site instead of, or in addition to, optimizing their website for placement in the organic search results.

Even though it's required to pay for the clicks your ads receive, advertising allows you to be proactive about when and where a listing for your site appears. Setting up an AdWords account takes minutes, and adverts may run just about immediately in response to keywords that you choose. The bottom line is... outside of paying for (SEM) your website traffic, if you want pages of your site to appear on the first few pages of the search results of the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo)then you must engage in and become proficient at SEO.

Getting your website (more accurately your web pages) in the top pages of the search results delivers to you by the search engines more market awareness and branding than all other advertising combined. When speaking of getting your pages ranked at the top of the search engine results, this is referring to the organic search results (SEO).

An organic search result is whereby a searcher finds websites via the unpaid listings that come up and not via the paid advertising links that populate the sides of the page. Remember... Per Per Click or PPC as it is known is an advertising tool used by businesses and websites where they pay a determined amount each time on of their ads is clicked on.

In other words, they pay for this traffic to land on their chosen page. The fee that the advertiser pays per click is determined by a bidding process. The amount of the bid necessary to garner a good position in the presented list of ads is determined by a number of criteria driven by the keyword that they want to bid on. This is very simple, quick mention of the PPC process.

Pay Per Click is indeed much more involved and complex, but for the purpose of this article, we'll focus on the organic searches. When it comes to search engines there are still really only three (well actually only one) that dominate the market share, and they are Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing). In fact, there is one that dominates even this short list... Google.

Numbers vary, but even today, it is estimated that Google's share of the search engine market is in the neighborhood of 70%.

With the search engine being the engine that determine the ranking of web pages which ultimately determines the amount of traffic that comes to a site, suffice it to say that it is a crucial strategy to make the search engines happy with your website and pages. Enter Search Engine Optimization next...