What is SEM?

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and is types of internet marketing. SEM promotes websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

When you search on any search engine for any term you will get list of many websites, many of these websites are there as a part of Search engine marketing. You can see on every search engines, there are free listings, paid listings, some promotional advertising in big banners etc. these are part of SEM.

What are different parts of SEM?

As we discussed Search engine marketing is a way of promoting websites so that it will increase the visibility of your website and your website user can find it easily.
SEM if consist of:



There are many different ways of getting link back to your website.
 Article Writing
 Blogging
 Press release
 Reciprocal links
 Buy text links
 Putting advertising and getting link back
 Comment writing
 Guest book signature

Posting on Forums
Signature on forums posts
Having 3rd Parties post on forums for you

 Writing for others blogs
 Putting signature on your web design work
And there are many other ways of getting very good quality links. This link building is very time consuming and it takes lots of man power as well. But it pays off at the end.

 Paid or free inclusion in directories
The directories like yahoo directory, DMOZ, yellow pages, true local etc directory inclusion is also a part of SEM as they are internet based and they are also increasing visibility of your business.

Many of these directories providing local data to many search engines, so when you search for any given term these directories provide them what are the local business relevant to searched term.

To get included in these types of directories, you need to follow their set guidelines and your website should meet certain criteria. If you are not meeting these criteria, then even you pay them they will not include your website in their list as they give more weight on quality rather then just money. As once their quality is down then no one will trust their data and take it as a junk result resulting in loss of revenue for them.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click is one for of instance marketing. It takes 10 minutes to setup and get started. Once you pay money and create advertise and start your campaign, you are on 1st page of search engine in sponsored section.

This pay per click marketing is very expensive in compared to SEO. You can come on top of all the result by paying more money per click. When every visitor clicks on your ad, you pay. If they don’t click you don’t pay. So one way your clicks are guaranteed. And if you have very good product to sell then this form of marketing is very good and you don’t have to wait for long time till you come naturally on result.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is rapidly growing in popularity in recent times. Social Media is now being used to source and target specific audiences and the tools availble to complete this task have become increasingly sophisticated and effective. From my own experience I have seen this form of marketing growing rapidly. Not all types of markets are suited to Social Media however some can benefit from it immensely.

How social media marketing is done?
In social media marketing you create your own profile on social websites. The website are like FaceBook, MySpace, twitter, Orkut, YouTube, Flicker, and many more websites. Once you create profile on these websites then you can target other people within those websites and offer your product to them and then follow up with them. It’s like you are creating friendship with them and then keep sending information about your product to them and their friends. It’s like viral marketing.

Social Bookmarking Sites:

You can do video marketing as well. You can create your products videos and put it on video websites like you tube and then market those videos as well.
These types of social media marketing are very effective in terms of return on investment. And you are targeting very specific audience to your product. You can filter out the group of people who will not be able to use your product.


What are the benefits of Search Engine Marketing?
Should I do SEM?