SEM Search Engine Marketing

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is a process to promote website on search engine rankings in search engine result pages. The phenomenon solely derived to target potential users to gain maximum ROI (Return Over Investment). This is done by increasing hits of visitors on website through the use of Search Engine Optimization SEO and other related tools including paid placement, contextual advertisements and paid inclusion.

As the number of sites is increasing rapidly since mid-late nineties some tools appeared as search engines to provide required information and link to the user. Suddenly it brought an idea of promoting website over the search engine ranking. The better is ranking, more hits you get. This resulted into building strategies to show up on the first page of SERP of search engines. Search engines started building their business models to cash this race. The first program was presented as pay per click in 1996 by Open Text and then Goto.com. Later it was adopted by Microsoft, Yahoo, Bing and obviously Google. Google's adwords program promoted this type of marketing globally. Its business model received overwhelming response and attained world wide success.

Internet Marketers or Search Engine Optimizers expanded the vision of customer by promoting the idea of Search Engine Marketing to attain maximum ROI by getting more traffic through advertisements. New SEO consultants emerged focusing upon marketing and advertising through search engines.

In 2001 SEM model was presented to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, Search Engine paid listing management, submitting sites to directories and developing online marketing strategies to promote businesses. As the idea grew bigger it also showed an offspring as SEMM Search Engine Marketing Management. SEMM is purely related with interest of ROI over the business through web promotions. SEMM also integrates organic SEO, trying to achieve top ranking without using paid means of achieving top in search engines, and PayPerClick SEO. some of the attention is placed on the web page layout design and how content and information is displayed to the website visitor. It does not focus on relevant traffic building only.