SEM - Search Engine Marketing

I wrote something for some office folks, thought it would nice thing to have on my blog too, hope someone finds this an interesting read.

Search Engine Marketing, generally involves a subset of operations in order to to make your site more visible on the internet, ie. Appear at fairly visible / the most effective postion when being searched on the internet on major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo!, AltaVista, Microsoft Live, Amazon etc.. Higher the position better it is.

Except for a handful countries, Google gets maximum search volume, about 70% of the total, It's extremely important to focus on the geo-target for proper optimization, for example if you're targeting india audience, you need to make sure Google is your priority one on optimization, over 90% search happens on google, Japan on the other hand seems to favor Yahoo!, US is a split of 65% on google rest of the traffic with rest of the providers Yahoo! holding about 19%.

For most part, Good URL's, META Tags, Title and Alt Tags, Spilling Keywords all over the document, Semantic structure of the document a robots.txt file would be the most obvious (and fundamental) things to help you be search engine freindly. You can also use number of online tools for key word generation, you can use third party tools or tools provided by search engine itself to make URL submissions.

Other tactics include getting your link to be on as many sites as possible (preferable, ones with higher rank on Google! than your site [Pagerank likes this]), Get some one to blog regular articles on your site etc etc..

The other thing you can do, of course is, buy positions in Search result sheets, like adwords.google.com, searchmarketing.yahoo.com, adcenter.microsoft.com what you can also do with these is create campaigns, generate / submit keywords, setup daily budget (min, max), pause campaigns, decide who to target (geography, age, culture blah blah..) and a whole lot more.

Besides all this, Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter provide their API's out in the open, So you can get your programs / application to think for you! What you can do with them is only limited to your creativity.