This article is about SEO and search engine marketing. SEO is short for search engine optimization. SEM is short for search engine marketing. SEM is a form of Internet marketing. The purpose is to increase the visibility of websites in the search engine (SE) result pages or SERPs. The technique for ranking highly in the SERPs is called search engine optimization. SEM encompasses more than search engines. You can promote your site through paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

SEO

A searcher uses a service like Bing, Yahoo or Google to find web pages relevant to certain search terms. Each of these services has its own index of pages it has found from crawling the web. Each service has its own way of trying to determine which pages best match the search terms, or keywords. The pages that match the search term are ranked by an algorithm. The pages which best fit the search terms according to the algorithm are presented first in the SERPs.

SEO is the process of making your site relevant for a set of keywords so that the site will rank highly in the SERPs. The higher the site is ranked by the SE, the more likely people will click on the result, driving traffic to your site. PPC PPC stands for Pay Per Click. This is a form of advertisement where the advertiser pays any time a visitor clicks on the link.

The most popular form of PPC is paid placement.

Paid placement refers to the sponsored links which are found along side and top of search engine results. Advertisers buy these ads from the SEs and bid for the placement. In general, the more the advertiser pays, the higher their ad gets placed. Another form of PPC is contextual ads. Contextual ads are found on many web sites. Ads for the page are selected by the contents of the page. So the ads are relevant to what is being discussed on the page. The advertiser pays when one of these ads are clicked. The owner of that web page gets commission for each click.

The final form of advertising is called paid inclusion. Paid inclusion is more like traditional advertising. The ad owner pays a web owner to display their ad on the site. Search engine marketing is a term that includes all facets of getting a site seen on the web. However, when some people talk about SEM, they exclude SEO. They define SEM more narrowly in terms of PPC.

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