6th August 2007

Search engine marketing is process of gaining and maintaining listings in search engines and directories to ensure customers can easily find products and services based on their search criteria.

The processes that are involved in search engine marketing include, directory and search engine registration, ensuring that your website is search engine friendly (Search engine optimisation), Pay per click (PPC) campaigns, Paid inclusion (PI) and Trusted feeds.

Given that around 85% of all web traffic originates from search engines and directories, usually with a targeted search for content, the importance of being well positioned within a search engine results page (SERP) is clear.

Good search engine ranking delivers pre qualified traffic, and is on the whole very cost effective.

So how is it done?

Paid placement, Humans and the spiders from Google.

There are broadly 3 types of search listing, each one with it's own way of ranking web pages.

The spiders.

Google is the most successful example of this, automated 'spiders' or 'crawlers' identify content and index it within Google's databases, using a secret algorithm to judge the relative ranking of individual pages against keywords and phrases.

The results gained from this automated indexing provides the volume of search results on most search engines, it's ranking is based upon the quality and relevancy of the results, and is generally the best trusted form of SERP representation.

To rank highly in these results takes time and effort in optimising web pages for search engine index ability, regularly updated content from database driven sites and large scale content management systems can seriously impair this 'organic' form of search engine representation.

Paid placement.

So with 85% of people using search engines to find stuff, a SERP ranking algorithm based upon result quality and a world full of businesses with ill optimised web pages and money to spend on customer acquisition plus search engine companies looking for ways to monetise their services, we have paid placement.

Paid placement works on a bidding system, where search keywords are bid for and the highest bidder comes first. Much of this is automated, and can result in dutch bidding where 2 bidders compete for the top spot and the price escalates over the going rate, hence management of the keywords and prices over time is necessary.

The Humans.

Directories such as Dmoz.org and Yahoo! are maintained by human editors, who individually check sites that are submitted to their directories, guaranteeing a level of quality in what is categorised.

An important point to make here is that most search engines will aggregate content from spiders, directories and paid placement, for example Google uses content from Dmoz.org to influence result positioning, as that means it has been checked by an editor and must be relevant.