Maintaining Your SEO Knowledge

One of the most important aspects of being an SEO is staying on top of the game. In this industry, more than any other that I can think of at the moment, the rules change on a regular basis. To remain a viable SEO you need access to this information and you need to know it is reliable. You can test and re-test to determine the changes yourself, but this would be a huge undertaking. Fortunately, we have a thriving online community in the SEO space to help you uncover this knowledge. Unfortunately, not everyone in this community follows the same ethical or professional standards. So finding good information can be tricky at times.

The three most basic avenues of information gathering in this field are SEO News sites or Newsletters, SEO Blogs, and most popular of all SEO Forums. Both the blogs and News related sites are very convenient. Someone else gathers the information and collects it under one roof. It’s basically up to you to find sources that are reliable and you can count on. Anyone can start one of these, so it is VERY important to know who is providing you the information. You can get bad advice from these types of site just as easily as you can get good. I can emphasize enough, know the source and until you are sure, verify anything you read.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

Contents

    * 1 Market structure

    * 2 History

    * 3 Ethical questions

    * 4 See also

    * 5 References

Market structure

In 2006, North American advertisers spent US$9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing.

History

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text in 1996 and then Goto.com in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers for search engines.

Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals.

Ethical questions

Paid search advertising has not been without controversy, and the issue of how search engines present advertising on their search result pages has been the target of a series of studies and reports. Consumer Reports WebWatch. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also issued a letter in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.

See also

    * Enterprise Search Marketing

    * List of search engines

Search engines with SEM programs

    * Google - global

    * Yahoo! - global

    * Microsoft Live - global

    * Ask.com - global

    * Baidu - China

    * Rambler - Russia

    * Yandex - Russia

    * Timway - Hong Kong

    * Onkosh - Arabic Search, Middle East

    * Ayna - Arabic Search engine , Middle East & North Africa