When talking about Search Engine Marketing (SEM) you are referring to two main activities and what is essentially now two main search engines.

SEM can be split into two key areas: organic or natural search and paid or pay per click (PPC) advertising.

Organic search involves the ‘normal’ listings in search engines, that is to say the non-paid listings. There are a number of factors that determine the Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) in the major search engines. These factors can be classified under two main headings, on page optimisation and off page optimisation.

On page optimisation includes factors related to your website or blog itself, examples of this would be:

• The text (or copy) you use on your website
• The way your website is constructed in terms of design and information architecture
• The coding of your website in terms of certain tags and structure
• The frequency with which your blog or website is updated

Off page optimisation includes factors external to your website, for example:

• Links to your website or blog from other relevant websites
• Links to your website or blog from relevant news or article sites

The process of optimising your blog or website for high SERP’s is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – a lot of acronyms already, I know! The process of SEO and achieving success in the rankings for the major search engines can take a number of months and should be viewed as a long-term commitment and strategy. This is especially true where there exists intense competition for certain key words and phrases – more on this later.

Paid or PPC search engine marketing involves bidding for certain key words and phrases that you would like your website or blog to rank highly for, those who bid the most get the top spot. Paid search can be used to good effect to achieve quick results and can be seen as a good tool to leverage in the shorter-term. It is questionable whether this alone, without any attention being paid to natural search, is a good long-term tactic.

In order to get the most out of any Search Engine Marketing campaign or long-term strategy keyword analysis must be undertaken in order to establish the most relevant and productive terms which your target audience will use to search for your products and services. There are a number of methods which are used to undertake such analysis and these range from old fashioned brain storming to more sophisticated use of software.

One school of thought focuses on use of longer search phrases containing a series of words, these are known as Long Tail search terms, for example “golf clubs north Leeds”. Because you are using more targeted phrases there is often an improved chance of gaining high search engine rankings due to improved targeting and reduced competition from the untargeted masses.

When relevant key phrases have been confirmed for use it is then possible to use on and off page optimisation techniques to feature the phrases by talking about “golf clubs north Leeds” on your site, in articles and through other sites.

In terms of major search engines we are now only really referring to two companies – Google and Yahoo/Bing – a recent merger which will see Yahoo retain the front end of their search engine with Microsoft’s Bing (formally Live Search) powering the back end.

Finally, the last important part of the Search Engine Marketing websites is monitoring all of the activity you are undertaking as well as your SERP’s in the Google and Yahoo search engines. There are number of free and paid tools available to help you do this ranging from very simple through to highly sophisticated. Some good free tools can be found at the Google Webmaster and SEOBook websites.

I hope you found this article useful and it has shed some light on the area of Search Engine Marketing.