As the toll booths on the information superhighway, search engines have come to dominate the daily research tasks of most Internet users. With their billions of daily search requests by hundreds of millions of users, the search engines have aggregated an audience that is both useful and attractive to online marketers.
Search engine marketing (SEM) has developed to take advantage of this wide audience reach. It includes subspecialties such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click keyword advertising, and strategic consulting to companies interested in leveraging the technical intricacies enabled by massive data capture and analysis.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s ranking in the free “organic” results that search engines offer to their users in response to user search queries. While there is a large industry of consultants who specialize in helping companies improve their search results rankings, the search engines themselves do not charge for SEO. Their rankings of websites in search results are based on proprietary algorithms for determining the most relevant websites for each customer’s search query.
Paid search, however, is a revenue-generating business for search engines. They offer advertising on their search results pages. Market leaders are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. The placement of such ads is dependent on the payment by advertisers. Selection of cost-effective keywords that trigger targeted advertisements in search engine results page ads for advertisers is a very active specialty of many SEM consultants.
by Scott Fox
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