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Search Engine
Marketing Industry
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Search Engine Marketing. The effort directed towards using search
engines to market a web site, the purpose may include improving
natural and paid listings or a combination of these and other search
engine-related activities. The basis of Search Engine marketing is
much like any other form of marketing. It's all about finding your
target market and hitting them. Finding them online is relatively
simple. Search Engines existed long before the Internet. Electronic
Card Catalogs, travel reservation systems and private search databases
have existed for almost as long as computers have. Early search
queries may have been made by punch card. Even in the early years of
the Internet, before the Internet evolved to include Web browsers,
there were search engines running a variety of programs and protocols.
Because techies have a strange sense of humor, many of these programs
are named after “Archie” comic book characters. These included Archie,
Veronica, and Gopher.
The concept behind Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is quite simple: when
a consumer or business person searches the Web through either a search
box or by clicking through a directory hierarchy, they are in “hunt
mode.” This mode is unique because it indicates that the person is
looking for information, usually of a direct or indirect commercial
nature. Marketers understand that this “hunt mode” means that the
searcher may very well be somewhere in the buying cycle. That makes
search engine results some of the best sources of targeted traffic,
whether that traffic originates from "organic" unpaid search listings
or paid advertising listings. Search engine traffic is a non-intrusive
method of Internet marketing. The majority of online and offline
advertising intrudes on the audience, interrupting their activities.
Search is unique in tapping a searcher at the exact moment they are
seeking knowledge or a solution. Searchers are on a mission – it’s
“just-in-time marketing”.
Search engine traffic originates from a voluntary, audience-driven
search. This means the visitors from a search results link have not
only selected your listing from among your peers, but chose the search
query that resulted in your listing being shown.
“Organic” search engine marketing (Organic Listings) combines the best
practices of technology, usability, copy/linguistics and online PR.
This is because many search engines base their relevancy algorithms on
a combination of the text they see on a page or site, combined with
external elements such as links and user behaviors/preferences.
Marketers can buy text-link search results on all of the top 15 search
sites. That’s quite a change from 1998 or before, when none of the
major search engines included paid listings within the search results.
The explosion in popularity of paid search results advertising can be
attributed to the search engines’ need for alternative revenue
sources, marketers’ increasing requests for search results traffic,
and the high value of the traffic generated through search results.
Unpaid search engine traffic was once fairly easy to garner -
before there were 3 billion documents competing for attention in the
search engine databases.
Some marketers believe that there are "tricks" that will improve the
relevancy of sites within the search engines that are spider based.
Not only do some of these tricks not work, many of them can result in
negative relevance penalties as the engines take measures to punish
search marketers who seek to manipulate ranking and relevance. That
said, there are still compelling reasons to put legitimate efforts
behind organic SEO optimization, particularly efforts in site design,
HTML formatting, copy optimization and server platform adjustments.
Within the last several years, paid listings have played an
ever-increasing role in most marketers’ minds, due to their increasing
screen real estate. Many marketers like to compare organic SEO to
public relations because PR is so important to a company, yet the ROI
on PR can sometimes be a challenge to measure. In both SEO and PR,
marketers have the options of hiring internal staff, bringing in
consultants, or using an outside agency. The same options apply for
paid search marketing. However, often larger paid search campaigns are
so large they may require some campaign optimization or bid management
technology combined with internal or external expertise. Search
marketing has already proven itself a valuable part of an overall
integrated campaign, for both branders and direct marketers. All kinds
of marketers can easily benefit from a dialogue with a searcher;
whether that searcher is facing a crisis, is in need of information,
or is ready to purchase.
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Search Engines |
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