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Improved Web Performance With SEM

Written by: Max Kalles

Article Overview: Every business needs a great site, but your site is nothing if your customers can't find it.

Improved Web Performance With SEM

Long gone are the days when you could simply stoke your web content with keywords and improve your web site's search engine rankings. With the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet is increasingly the primary source of information and communication for anyone with access.

The result is exponential increases in internet traffic and the vast majority of that traffic flows through search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.. While Google's share of the search engine market is massive (around 70%), there is still heavy competition between the major SE players. Why? Because traffic means business and business means money; lots of it.

With so much at stake, the search engines needed to become more customer focused. It is no longer good enough to list the most popular sites, or the sites that are merely packed with the appropriate keywords.

Relevance is now key and it’s what the search engines look for when a surfer enters a search term. The more relevant the results are to the surfer, the more likely it is that he or she will use that search engine again. So the search engines are spending copious quantities of cash to find ways to better determine the relevance of web sites for any particular search term.

But, what does it all mean for your web site? In a single acronym, SEM, or Search Engine Marketing. Without SEM, your web site might be the most beautiful ever made, with leading edge functionality and everything your customers need - but no one will ever find it. SEM gives your website a presence on the internet.

There are two main components of SEM - search engine optimization (SEO) and paid listings, which, on a search engine results page, take the form of pay-per-click (PPC) listings. A SEM campaign can be just SEO, just PPC, or any combination of the two.

SEO means making your site more relevant to the terms your customers use to find your business through a search engine. Content, lots of pertinent, well-written content, and the number of times other sites link to yours, are among the criteria used by search engines to determine relevance for search terms. For example, if someone searches "men's brown shoes", and your site has a lot of good quality content about men's brown shoes, and other sites are linking to your content because it is so good, then a search engine will rank your site higher than other sites that did not have the content and inbound links.

PPC is a little more straightforward. Your PPC listing appears when someone enters a particular search term. If the surfer clicks on your PPC listing, you pay a predetermined amount to the search engine. For example, your “men’s brown shoes” PPC listing would appear every time someone entered that search term – and you would pay nothinfg for it to be listed. You would only pay if someone clicked on the listing. The more you pay, the higher your PPC listing will appear in the results.

It's not enough to have a great site, you need to create a web presence and SEM is a good way to do it.

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Article Tags: google, pay per click, search engine optimization



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