Why Search?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) encompasses all strategies that involve promoting a Web site in the search engine rankings.  The higher your website is in the rankings, the more visitors you will receive, and the more sales you'll make.  SEM includes search engine optimization (SEO), which involves optimizing the code and layout of your website to cater to search engines.  In other words, if search engines understand your website, they will be more likely to index its pages.  Your pages must be "indexed" by search engines before they can appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).  When you do a search in Google, for example, the results page listing the links corresponding to your search is called a SERP. 

What is the Goal of SEM?

The goal of SEM is two-fold.  One, to find out what people are searching for in your industry, and two, to optimize your website so that your pages are ranked as highly as possible for these searches.  For example, if 10,000 people per day search for "seo tips," but only a tenth of these people search for "seo tip" (singular), you want to optimize your page for the plural version.  

Note: some search engines don't distinguish between singular and plural.  But since the top three (Google, Yahoo, and MSN), which make up more than 90% of the market, do, we'll focus our examples on distinguishing between the two.

Never Neglect Your Visitors!

One thing that I'd like to point out now and that I'll point out again and again is that while you get more involved in search marketing and various search optimizations, you should keep one rule in mind at all times.  That is, to never neglect your visitors in favor of search engines. 

What does this mean exactly?  Some SEO enthusiasts will get so caught up in search engine optimizing and marketing their site that they end up catering more to the search engines (machines), instead of the human beings they're doing this all for to begin with.  Bottom line is - when you're deciding on whether or not to use or engage in a particular search optimization, always ask yourself first how this will affect your visitors experience on your website.  After all, the search engines were built to help users find things, and ultimately they will be catering to the user as well.  So it's in your best long-term interest, not only for your users, but for your search campaign as well, to cater first to your users, and second to search engines.

A good example that comes to mind is with keyword stuffing - SEO enthusiasts that stuff their pages with keywords to help their page achieve a higher ranking.  The page may achieve a higher ranking (or it may not if you overdo it and the search engine frowns upon you , but what good will that do if people don't end up reading your page because it's frustrating to read?  You'll have achieved your objective of receiving more visitors, but your end goal of satisfying your visitors with quality information won't be met, so your optimization will have been for nothing.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves optimizing your website code so that it can be indexed readily by search engines, which means the millions of people in your industry searching for your products and services online will, if you promote your site effectively, find you before your competition.  By actively engaging yourself and promoting your website you can significantly increase the traffic to your website.  Websites that effectively take advantage of search marketing gain a huge edge over their competition.  Read on to learn more about the basics of search engine optimization and search marketing and how you may take advantage of these techniques to grow your brand.

Next up: how do search engines find my website?

The next article in our getting started series addresses the question - How do search engines find my website?  After that we'll delve deeper into SEO and how you can optimize your own website.