Search Engine Marketing

Posted by Business
By Takara Alexis


Search engine marketing typically gets confused with search engine optimization, but there is a distinct difference between the two, money. When engaging in search engine optimization there is usually no money being paid whereas search engine marketing requires you to pay in order to get access to the services you desire. $13.5 billion was spent on search engine marketing in 2008 and the amount is going up each year. The three largest players in search engine marketing are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.

Google AdWords is Google's main source of income, in 2010 Google brought in $28 billion in advertising revenue. Google AdWords offers three main ways for companies to advertising, pay-per-click, cost-per-thousand advertising, and site-targeted advertising for banner or rich media ads. When using the pay-per-click system marketers choose how much they are willing to "bid" for a certain keyword, this means they set a maximum for what they are willing to pay-per-click. If there bid is high enough they will show up on Google as a sponsored link and hopefully be seen by the user. Marketers also have access to the "Google Display Network" which are sites that aren't search engines.

Google will place banner or rich media ads on these sites for you based on keywords you have entered and what Google has determined the subject of the website to be. Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter both work very similarly to Google AdWords, but they don't offer users the ability to enter a "display network" like Google does.

Search engine marketing has been the subject of some controversy in the past. Users would sometimes not be able to distinguish what were organic search results and what were paid placement search results. Most search engines now make it clear which results are organic and which are sponsored, but users still need to be careful as changes are always being made.

A major controversy associated with search engine marketing is whether companies should be able to bid on the brand names or product names owned by their competition. Should Playstation be able to bid on the search term Xbox? This is an ongoing debate and even though Google has repeatedly changed its policy companies continue to complain.

Search engine marketing is an industry that is growing larger and becoming more useful as the years pass. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft provide the three most useful tools for getting involved in SEM, but as with everything, you should be careful with how you use it and make sure your SEM practices are ethical.




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