Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is the general term that is used when dealing with ALL aspects of promoting your website and increasing its traffic and in the case of ecommerce, increase profits. The key areas of SEM are listed below:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This is the most important aspect of Search Engine Marketting there is, closely followed by Reciprocal links. In fact I'd go as far as saying that it is pointless doing any of the other steps that follow without doing Search Engine Optimisation and Reciprocal links first. In many cases SEO and Reciprocal Links are the only SEM you will need to do. SEO is such a big subject it warrants it's own Search Engine Optimisation page, either click the link or use the menu on the left.
Reciprocal Links
One of the key aspects of SEM and how the search engines rank your site is the number of quality relevant reciprocal links you have. A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two websites to ensure mutual traffic. Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories, in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine marketing process because Google et. al. uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.
Persuading good quality, relevant sites to link to you can be tedious, time-consuming and frustrating. Manual link exchange takes more time, but it's worth 10 fold more than an automatic link exchange service. Dead links on your site or exchanging links with webmasters who are not reciprocating properly is of no value to you. One way to find link partners is to do searches in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! to find sites which complement yours but are not direct competitors. These sites should be open to requests for forming an alliance as the link exchange is mutually benificial. We provide all of our clients with the means to update their own links page, and for those who have the time, we've provided you with some useful reciprocal link tips of the trade.
For those who are too busy or non technical but recognise that the success of their website depends on building reciprocal links - we can do the work for you, just get in touch
Paid Inclusion
There are many search engines and directories that for a fee will add your site to their database more quickly than the search engine 'spiders' will do by themselves. In fact there are many directories that will only list your site for a fee. If you have the resources available to pay, your site will get listed sooner and will be 'spidered' more often allowing you to see the affect on your ranking quicker for any changes you make to your sites content.
Search Engine Advertising
This method involves placing a paid advertisement on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Usually these ads appear based on the key words the user has entered into the search box, and you are charged based on the number of times your advertisement appears (the number of impressions) regardless of whether the ad sends anyone to your site or not.
Pay-Per-Click Campaign
Pay-per-click ads are text based ads that appear in the search engine results, as the name implies you only pay when someone clicks the link to your site. You decide which key words should bring up your ad, you write the copy and decide how much you want to pay (the more specific the search term, the higher the cost per click). Like any ad campaign, be prepared to invest the time as well as the money on how effective the search terms are.
