In order to fully understand how everything you see online is a part of search engine marketing or SEM you will need to first understand, what SEM is? Now if you want to promote your website / business via the internet you will need to start an online marketing campaign with a focus on your search engine optimization strategy. The goal of promoting your website is to attract traffic, the more traffic a website gets the higher it ranks and the more money it makes, well if it converts (to sales).

There are a number of SEM methods that are used to increase web traffic to a website. Usually an SEM campaign will be a combination of SEO, paid placements, paid inclusion, and PPC (pay per click) advertisements. During an SEM campaign, web traffic should be closely monitored for sudden increases and decreases, since the amount of traffic to a webpage is really a measurement of how successful an SEM campaign is (conversion is another story).

Every time you download a free e-book or read an interesting article, you might think that you did it for free. As much as that might be true, the real motive behind that article or e-books is really to promote something. If you take a closer look you will see links to websites, recommendations of various products you should buy, and services you should sign up for. These are all part and parcel of a website or business’s SEM campaign.

Here is how it works in a nutshell; the objective of an internet marketer is to increase web traffic via SEM. One of the things a search engine looks at is web traffic, search engines can measure web traffic and rank websites on the basis of the traffic they receive. Search engines love information, they also love raw text files and text in general, so when you put up something that is informational, and the search engines 'crawl' it, you have greater appeal for their customers...searchers. This will help you accomplish two primary objectives a. to draw traffic to your website and b. to get listed on a search engine’s organic results. 

Now a lot of people really can’t understand how blogs are a part of the search engine marketing universe. The idea of a blog is simple yet very powerful. A blog is like a collection of articles, reviews, and miscellaneous information. Blogs are known for being non-commercial and information based, meaning that they don’t sell anything, but just provide information (certainly not true of all blogs, like this one :-). Search engines seem to love blogs since they offer such a log of information. However what most people don’t realize that most blogs are owned by businesses, these businesses run blogs in order to recommend and inform people about the various trends in their respective industry, solutions, and perhaps how their products or services fit into a given solution. This is most often accomplished by providing advice, tips and tutorials.

Most blogs will also have a back link to the website that really owns the blog, which is a very tactful yet effective Search engine optimization technique known as ‘back linking ‘. The more back links a website has the higher it ranks in a search engine’s organic results, it is also one of the most primary techniques used.

image credits to Spencer Olinek