Search Engine Marketing ( SEM / LSEM )

SEM: What is Search Engine Marketing?

A form of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). SEM methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, digital asset optimization and paid inclusion.

Search Engine Optimization ( SEO )

In today's climate, it is important that your website has all of the elements of search engine optimization, (aka search engine positioning, search engine ranking or search engine placement) and the TsunamiSEO team ensure they only use ethical search engine optimization techniques while working on your website. Our search engine optimizers do not use Black Hat SEO, such as hidden text, cloaked pages, mini-nets, link farms, spam indexing, duplicate doorway pages, link schemes, etc, as any of these black hat SEO techniques can lead to penalties or a permanent ban from the major search engines.

At TsunamiSEO, our Graphic Design team , SEO and Developers all work very closely from the very first day and believe that your web site design should be optimized to be search engine friendly, attractive, rich in SEO Web Content, fast-loading and the site should be easy to navigate. Designing your site, by focusing on all of these SEO friendly prerequisites, create loyal customers, brand your business, generate unlimited traffic and convert leads to sales.

Paid Placement

Another variable in Search Engine Marketing is Pay per click advertising, or PPC, which is a great way to quickly drive targeted traffic to your site. Instead of paying upfront for placing your ad on the search engines, you are only charged when someone actually clicks on your keyword-targeted advertisement. Google, Yahoo, and Bing all offer pay-per-click advertising on their search engine result pages (SERPs), and can feed your ads to smaller search engines to expand your reach. In addition to the search engines offering PPC now some social networking sites have gotten into the game and are starting to show a real promise to target your clients in a cost effective manner. Facebook is leading the way when it comes to PPC on a social networking site.

Site optimization for good ranking in the natural listings takes time and is an ongoing process of adding fresh content and building links. Even if you already have a well-optimized site, there may be some additional keywords that you would like to show up for in the search engines. (It is virtually impossible to naturally optimize your site for every single keyword related to your site.) You may even want your ad to show for those extra-competitive keywords that are also poor choices for natural optimization. Pay-per-click advertising, PPC, provides a great solution to all of these problems — and it works! Paid placement enables you to buy your way to the top of the listings!

Contextual Advertising

A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. The advertisements may be displayed on the webpage or as pop-up ads. For example, if the user is viewing a website pertaining to sports and that website uses contextual advertising, the user may see advertisements for sports-related companies, such as memorabilia dealers or ticket sellers. Contextual advertising is also used by search engines to display advertisements on their search results pages based on the keywords in the user's query.

Digital Asset Optimization ( DAO )

Our industry rolls along at breakneck speed. We are peeking around the corner trying to get a glimpse of Web 3.0 and big brand marketers are certainly investing heavily in the digital assets that make your user experience more engaging. Problem is that the search engines are still firmly rooted in Web 1.0. We are constantly asked by our clients to build rich experiences, integrate video, design pageless interfaces, connect widgetry and find ways to blow your mind on behalf of global brand marketers. But how in the world do we make sure that the search engines can engage with this content?

Barring a quantum leap in the ability of search algorithms to “understand” digital assets such as images, videos, audio and interactive design, our job as optimizers is to make sure that the search engines can understand the context in which these assets live. This would include optimizing at this time mostly pictures to show up in the image search engines such a Google Images ans Bing and the same goes with video. These are great ways to bring more traffic to your site.

Paid Inclusion ( Pay for Placement )

Paid inclusion is the process of paying search engines to index pages from your site. It is also often called PFI (Pay for Inclusion) or PPI (Pay Per Inclusion).

This option is becoming more popular with both site owners and search engines. Site owners that want to get indexed quickly like it because they don't have to wait for the search engines to find their sites naturally through incoming links and listings in directories. Search engines like it because it is a way to increase revenue by charging the site owners for this service. If you have the budget and you don't want to wait, this is a good option.