Search Engine Marketing
Marketing is a very complex science which developed exponentially over the past few years. In simple terms, marketing is used to increase the users’ awareness regarding a certain brand or idea and it leads to the increase of sales volume when we are speaking about the marketing of products. As technology evolved and as the consumer patterns changed, marketers changed as well in order to keep up with the customers.
In the old days when you wanted to buy something you had to get out of the house and go physically in the store an buy that certain product. Today things have changed, we no longer have to do that, instead we have millions of stores at our disposal at one click away. For example, today a person living in Chicagoland Area can buy products which normally could have been found on the shelf only in Asia. Due to this drastic increase of liberty, marketers found new ways to promote products through the help of Search Engine Marketing also known as S.E.M.
Internet marketing comes in many forms and one of them is Search Engine Marketing. It is a marketing tool aimed to increase the visibility and popularity of websites for users by listing them on top in search engine result pages. This is accomplished with the help of the following three tools:
- Paid placement: If you are willing to pay a certain amount of money in order to assure yourself a certain volume of traffic than this is the best tool for you. This method consists in signing a contract with a search engine company such as Google or Yahoo and when somebody searches a term the search engine calculates the most relevant query and extracts relevant content from your page and places your web site on the top of the page. These sites are known also as “Sponsored Listings”. You will notice that all sites that pay for this service will appear in the right side on the web result page while the free sites appear in the left side. The advantage of this method is that the Sponsored Listings have a great control over the ad’s title, description and also what page it links to from the website. The web sites pay for this service only if they are accessed. The price depends on many factors but in general it stays between 0.5$ and 2.00$ per click.
- Contextual advertising: This method of search engine marketing works by scanning websites for keywords and then sends advertisements on the webpage that the user is watching. For example a tourist might want to search “Chicagoland Area”, in this case the user may be subject to advertisements related to tourism companies that have special offers for Chicago or from Airlines companies that offer special prices for flights towards that destination. These advertisements may also appear under the form of pop-ups. Contextual advertising is also known as “in-Text” advertising or “In-Context” technology.
- Paid inclusion: While it is the last of the three search engine marketing tools, it is also a SEO tool. This is how experts can experiment and try out new strategies for improving ranking. Usually the results can be seen in a couple of days instead of waiting for weeks or even months. The way this tool works is very similar to paid placement in the sense that search engines perceive a fee (per click or annually) and then include those websites that pay the fee in their search index. These sites are also known as Sponsored Listings. The line between paid placement and paid inclusion is very thin. There are voices saying that paid listings should be catalogued as advertisements. Paid inclusion as a search engine marketing tool offers the advantage that site owners can specify schedules for crawling pages. This characteristic of paid inclusion seems to be most useful in the cases of pages that undergo constant changes and are dynamically generated. Whether you business is set in Chicagoland area or anywhere else in the world, these search engine marketing tools are effective regardless of your business location.
Paid Placement Vs Paid Inclusion
At a first glance these two concepts seem very familiar but if you look deeper you will find many differences, so I felt that I should dedicate special attention to this as to not generate confusion.
Paid placement is a tool for search engine marketing where advertisers or site owners pay a certain amount of money so that their page can rank artificially higher than other sites in an index. The mechanism behind all this is keyword driven and the marketer or site owner buys keywords or key phrases.
Paid Inclusion is also a tool for search engine marketing but it works in a different way. It guarantees site owners’ inclusion and refresh (only for crawler based services) in the specified index. The prices are generally expressed per URL and for one year of inclusion. The main difference come now: paid inclusion only concerns with the index inclusion and has no effect on ranking.