A quick glimpse at the basics of search engine optimization and online marketing.

1. What is Search Engine
Marketing?
By John Romaine
http://www.seotrainingkit.com

2. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a type of
internet marketing that aims at increasing a
website’s prominence in search engine result
pages in order to gain increased traffic for the
site. The gain in traffic is supposed to translate
into additional sales.
 Search engine marketing falls into two broad
categories.
 SEO or search engine optimization
 Paid search advertising

3. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 It is not uncommon, however, to find
people who use the term search engine
marketing or SEM to refer solely to paid
advertising efforts. They make a
distinction between unpaid, organic
listings obtained solely by search engine
optimization (SEO) and listings that are
attained by paying for them.

4. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 The methods of SEO are all natural. SEO
practitioners wait for a website to be
automatically crawled by a search engine’s
spiders and to be added to the search
engine index, making use of keywords,
links, and other techniques in order for the
website to rank high in search results. In
SEM, the website owner pays the search
engine or directory in order to be included
into its database immediately.

5. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 In both search engine optimization (SEO)
and search engine marketing (SEM),
keyword analysis and selection play a
crucial role. In SEM, however, once the
right key phrases are identified,
webmasters generally avail of paid
advertising in the form of PPC.

6. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 PPC, or Pay Per Click, are text-only ads
based on the key phrases the webmaster
wishes to appear in his ads. He writes the
copy and determines how much he is
willing to pay in order for his ad to appear.

7. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 The ads appear on search engine result
pages that are relevant to his target
market or on websites with content
relevant to his target market and who
have agreed to display ads. This
advertising model is termed Pay Per Click
because the advertiser only pays
whenever a searcher clicks on his ad and
is directed to the his website.

8. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 It is sometimes referred to also as CPC or
Cost Per Click. There is another
advertising model that is more akin to
traditional advertising, in which the
advertiser pays for the number of times an
ad appears, regardless of whether the ad
sends anyone to his website.

9. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 The advantage paid search engine
marketing offers is that it gives the
webmaster immediate visibility and, it is to
be hoped, traffic. If one has a large
budget, then this is a viable model.

10. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 However, because paid advertising is
expensive, it is essential to have a site
that’s well prepared and delivers to the
searcher what he is seeking for.

11. What is Search Engine Marketing?
 It’s all money down the drain if the PPC
ads deliver the searcher to one’s website
but when the searcher gets there, he
doesn’t find the answer he was seeking or
the site fails to deliver on its promise
somehow.