What Is Search Engine Marketing?

Most people maybe more familiar with the term SEO than with SEM(Search Engine Marketing). But they are actually quite close. The only difference is that SEM is broader than SEO. I have mentioned a web site www.sempo.org in one of my earlier posts. Let's refer to it again for the definition:

Search Engine Marketing: The act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of of these and other search engine-related activities.

"Improving rank in organic listings" sounds like the domain of search engine optimization and it is. But SEM includes other forms of advertising too. One of the hottest form is Paid Listings. Again, according to sempo:

Paid Listings: Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement and paid inclusion programs. In contrast, organic listings are not sold.

To give you a clear picture of what Paid Listings is, you can conduct a search in Google. In the results page, you will see a block with a light blue background at the very top of the results and the right area called Sponsored Links. They come from Google's Adwords program. They are different from organic results in that if you click on one of those links, someone is going to pay for that click. Thus the name Pay Per Click or PPC.

Other forms you see quite a lot are banner ads, skyscrapers and affiliate ads. Banner ads may refresh or rotate every now and then. A good example of affliate ads is Amazon affliate program.
It is free to join and you receive a small percentage of the sale if someone purchase a Amazon product through your link.

Among all the ads forms, the most popular is Google Adsense. It works like this: Every time your visitor clicks on the Google Adsense ads on your site, a percentage goes into your pocket.