What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an umbrella term that describes the different methods you can use to make your Web site more visible on search engines so that you can drive more traffic to your site. SEM blends organic (i.e., free) search engine optimization (SEO) with paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to increase exposure for your Web site.

SEO focuses on designing and optimizing your Web site so that your site will rank higher within the organic search results pages — the list of Web sites that pop up when you conduct a search. Basically, search engines such as Google or Bing look at a page and try to decipher the most important or relevant information on the page.

SEO revolves around figuring out what keywords people will use when they are looking for the types of services and/or products you provide, and then using them in your Web pages and content so that search engines accurately index your site and people can easily find it. When you use SEO techniques, you are not paying the search engines to appear on or to secure better ranking their site, you are simply optimizing your content so that it will naturally place higher in search results.

In contrast, paid search or PPC advertising involves paying search engines so that your site appears as a sponsored link in the small text ads that appear on the top and right-hand side of a search results page — think Google AdWords. While you can display your ad on Google or another search engine for free, you pay the search engine vendor every time someone clicks on your link.

The search engine vendor positions your site on the results page based on a combination of how much you are willing to pay-per-click, and a subjective quality assessment of how important your ad is in relation to others on the page. This quality measurement includes factors such as the percentage of clicks on your ad and how many times the search term appears in your ad.
Why Should You Care?

What good is your Web site if you’re not driving traffic to it? You invest in a Web site to help educate prospects and customers and to promote your products and services. But if people can’t find it, you will not get the kind of results you want from your Web site.

Both organic and paid search techniques can help you drive traffic, but each method has different pluses and minuses. For instance, while you invest time (and maybe money, in the form of an SEO marketer or a service) to optimize natural search results, you’re not paying the search engine vendor for every click-through. In addition, people click on organic search engine results much more frequently than they click on PPC ads, because of where they appear on the page.

On the other hand, a PPC campaign can typically ramp up traffic to your site much more quickly than organic SEO. So, if time is of the essence — you need to drive holiday sales — PPC is likely to help you get better results.

Many businesses find it most effective to combine both SEO and PPC approaches. For example,

PPC helps you quickly test keywords to see which search terms work and which don’t. As you discover which terms work best in a PPC campaign, you can also incorporate them into your organic SEO approach.
What to Consider

Web searches are becoming the top way for both consumers and businesses to research and shop for products and services. Consequently, small businesses are rapidly shifting their marketing initiatives from traditional media to digital marketing media tools, including SEO and SEM.

These marketing tools are often less expensive to use than traditional marketing options such as print advertising and direct mail. A small investment can help companies significantly boost marketing reach and return. SEO and SEM give small businesses more visibility into whether they’re reaching their target audiences, easier ways to track and measure payback on their efforts and the ability to rapidly adjust and refine campaigns and outreach as needed.

However, search engine marketing techniques involve both art and science, and are evolving at a rapid pace. What works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow. To stay ahead of the competition, consider services that are tailored to your specific market and needs.


The Web is becoming our virtual shopping mall. Small businesses that understand different types of organic and paid search approaches, and use those most relevant to their business, will have a big advantage in bringing in traffic.

Is page load speed (site speed) a factor in Google PageRank?

Officially, the speed of your site isn't a critical factor. BUT, here is (Google's bigwig) Matt Cutts' comment on the issue: "Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

So, err on the side of caution and streamline your site to have it an its optimal load speed- not too many images, no large images, minimal or no Flash, etc. The user experience is still paramount to Google's official stance, and no one wants to wait for minutes while a site loads.

Twitter Debuts Native Retweet Feature

Until now, Twitter never had a function on its own site to "retweet" messages with a single click. Users had to manually resubmit tweets that they liked, unless they used a automated 3rd-party program (such as TweetDeck). The biggest change in Twitter's own native software will be aiming to preserve the original content by removing the additional syntax that accompanies retweets, as well as the ability to annotate the post or add comments. This will eliminate spamming or causing unintentional negative reactions, as people can currently retweet others' messages and change the original tweet. Head over to Extima for more info...

Importance of utilizing a sitemap

A sitemap is a list of all of the pages in your website. It can contain information for search engines to both find all pages of your site more easily as well as tell search engines how often to check back on each page. It is a tool that many Webmasters neglect to use, although it is helpful both to the search engines as well as maintaining the organization of your site.