Cai Thomas.com The personal website of Cai Thomas

SEM

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Written by Cai Thomas

There are a number of key rules that a site must follow to get to the top of a search engines results pages (SERPs). I will cover these in more detail in subsequent posts, however the basis of all SEO is based around a the quality and quantity of relevant content on the website and the number of inbound links from relevant websites. The number of visitors is also seen as important, though this is less of a factor for more niche keywords or topics.

The biggest name in paid SEM is Google Adwords, though there are a number of competitors out there include Yahoo search marketing and Microsoft Bing (Microsoft Adcentre). Paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is now the biggest marketing media (in terms of revenue) in the world, with billions of adverts being displayed everyday. The key to SEM is making sure that you are targeting your audience. With Google being the biggest search engine in the world, it is not surprising that Google Adwords is therefore the biggest provider of SEM.

There are two ways of advertising on search engines. The first is standard Pay Per Click advertising (CPC). This is where you bid for your advert to appear in googles search results when a user searches for a specific keyword or phrase.

For example you could bid £1.00 for your advert to appear when SEO is typed in. It is of course a lot more complicated than this, with variables such as your website relevancy and the level of competition (competitors bidding on the same keyword or phrase). I will go through this in A lot more detail in subsequent posts.

The second method of advertising is Cost Per Thousand Views (CPM). This is where rather than paying for individual clicks, you pay for the number of times the advert is displayed. This can be either very effective if your advert has a high click through rate, or very expensive if the site gets a high volume of irrelevant searches. CPM has been stopped on Google Adwords now, however they do provide an indicative CPM figure on your Adwords account for comparison.