Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a broad term encompassing all forms of marketing through search engines. SEM accounted for approximately 7 percent of the total ads spend in the US and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20percent till 2010. Google, Yahoo and MSN collectively represent approximately 80 percent of the search engine advertising market.

Evolution of SEO

With the evolution of Internet, the earliest search engines started to appear around early 1990s. The searchalgorithms used during these early days were primitive and thus did little or no link analysis to rate the relevancy ofthe pages retrieved. Examples of these engines were JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider. The problem with these was that they listed results in the order that theywere found and provided no discrimination based on the quality and relevancy of the results.

By the year 1996, site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites ranked higher in search engine results. This paved the platform for the advent of keyword based search engine optimization.

Initially, search engines were supplied with information about the pages by the webmasters themselves. Initial versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information, such as keyword meta-tags, which providedan indication about the contents of each page. But indexing pages based upon meta-tag data were found to be lessreliable, because sometimes meta-tags included irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for thewebsites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta-data in meta-tags caused pages to show up for irrelevantsearches, and failed to appear for relevant searches. Search engines responded by developing more complex algorithms, taking into account various additional factors as well. Examples of these included the PageRank algorithm developed by Google, which ranked web pages based on the number and quality of links found2. Thesearch results now retrieved are better than the earlier search results as the new results are ranked in order of relevancy and frequency of the appearances of the searched keywords.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a term used to describe a process to increase the value of a particular website and its respective recognition by the search engines. The end objective is to generate more qualified traffic through natural search results.Web pages especially created with SEO in mind have a strong focus on content as well as a structure that is favorable to search engine algorithms. To the human visitors, the website should look be easy to read and address their needs, ideally particular to their search inquiry. Effective SEO efforts focus on terminology being used by targetsegments to describe needs, problems or solutions. However, the website must be structured on making it convenient for search engine programs to index the site’s content. This involves changes such as optimizing a site’s presentation or structure, which are not noticeable to human visitors.