Over the years, Internet marketing has grown by leaps and bounds. All kinds of businesses are trying to garner the benefits that an online presence offers. And an online presence for an existing business does often mean increased profits. And with increasing competition, with everyone having logged on, just having a website is not adequate. Also called e-commerce, internet marketing covers everything from information management to sales. Dedicated areas such as public relations and customer service and many others have also joined into this multifaceted world. The expansion of internet marketing gave rise to search engine marketing. SEM’s main objective is to improve the visibility of a website on the results pages of major search engines. There are three main techniques of carrying out SEM are Search engine optimization (SEO), Pay per click and Paid inclusion.
What Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does is that it adjusts the content and structure of a website to attain the closest possible match to what visitors on search engines are looking for. Also known as Search Engine Advertising, Pay per Click advertising, is the process in which advertisers bid on “keywords” that they are sure their target user will type into the search bar. These “sponsored ads”, as they are called, appear above the search results and an advertiser pays when the user clicks on the advertisement. The third technique of SEM, Paid Inclusion, is quite basic as suggested by the name. Website owners pay search engines, usually an annual fee, in order to be listed on their search pages.
Evidently PPC and Paid Inclusion look like the fastest methods of search engine marketing. Nevertheless, many websites desire to take up the more time consuming Search Engine Optimization approach for better marketing of their website on search engines. The name SEO is deceptive as the idea is in fact to optimize the web page to attract visitors on leading search engines. Search engines work on the basis of definite algorithms, and the idea behind SEO is to keep keywords on websites in sync with these algorithms. The focus is not on a precise understanding of the algorithms. Here it becomes vital to know your target audience, anticipate the keywords they will type, and to make sure your website is loaded with these keywords. The idea was to stress on keyword density. Keyword density, as the name suggests, is pretty simply how often a predefined set of keywords is repeated on a web site. Over the years, wrong practices such as keyword stuffing has made search engines like Google cautious of giving significance to keyword density. Given this situation website owners are now advised to write content meant for visitors, rather than “stuff” their website with keywords just to draw high ranking. However another common unethical practice is the incorporation of highly searched keywords that have nothing at all to do with the content on the page. This again may momentarily attract high ranking, but is will end up in the site being caught and banned.
Tags: SEO
