We’ve had a recent up-tick it seems in clients wanting to know how to make their web-site more visible to search engines and, more importantly, people. This used to be called SEO but, seems the new phrase is SEM.
The bottom line is this: SEM is a marketing campaigns based on search.
What SEM Is:
The process of marketing your site and or services through search engines; namely Bing and Google. Make sure your site shows up properly for terms that people are searching for. Make sure your using the right keywords. Make sure you’re getting links that are on target.
There are dozens of options at your disposal. The basics are:
- Build a Quality Site with Quality Content
- Acquire Links to your site and pages
- Promote via Social Media
Firstly building a quality site, that is having original well-formed content. You’ll want appropriate keywords, but don’t over saturate. And make sure the site you operate follows current "best practices" (use a tool like: SEO Sorcerer).
Get some links. Ask your blogging friends or those who operate other sites to link to you. Perhaps your web-designer or developer can link to you. There are also tools to purchase links however, those are generally frowned upon by search engines.
More Facebook Likes, Tweets, Plus-Ones and Pins and all that social stuff helps. Perhaps run an advertisement on Facebook or try to introduce a new hashtag on Twitter (or use popular ones in your tweets).
That’s the basics of what SEM is. The reality of the situation, like so many other things, is that SEM is a big, complicated realm. It’s generally a good idea to get a consultant or other subject matter expert involved to help you. SEM is much to complicated to be executed properly while trying to run your business.