• What is search engine marketing?
• How does a search engine work?
• What are the elements of SEM?
• What is organic or natural search versus paid search?
• How long will an SEM project take?
• How do I determine ROI?
  And can SEM improve my company's business?

What is search engine marketing?

Ah ... the wild and magical world of the search engine. Where you and anyone can type in the most enigmatic phrase and get a response. Instantly, the Internet appears to shrink to manageable size; and there is no messy Dewey Decimal System to complicate things. With a handy list of search results, shoppers can browse and research to their hearts' content, and make what they feel are the correct purchases for them at the best price. They search by brand, by product name, by location, by color, by any qualifier that meets their fancies.

In other words, the search engine is one of the few places on the Internet where a company can connect with a user at the point of interest.

You are now doing business in a world where the search engine is the first stop that customers make. According to Harris Interactive (Rochester, N.Y.), in 2005, 88 percent of online shoppers researched before they made a purchase, and more than 65 percent of those shoppers used search engines to do so. Rightly or wrongly, users view search rankings as a validation of a company's popularity and importance, and rightly or wrongly, this raises the importance of search engines to any company. It is a huge market that many companies leave untapped, oblivious to the amount of business they lose, unaware that their rankings are something they can influence, or mystified about the manner in which they can do so.

The goal of search engine marketing (SEM) is for your company's website to rank at the top of any potential customer's search results page. This is done using a combination of paid advertising, search engine-optimized website design, high-quality marketing copy and involvement in your industry's online community. And keywords. Lots and lots of keywords.

This list may seem daunting, but fear not. Using some tried and true marketing and technical know-how, a company can influence how search engines rank its site.

How does a search engine work?

A search engine copies webpages, stores information about the content on those webpages, and uses that information to respond to a search. When a person enters topical words into an engine, the search engine presents a list of pages with sites ranked according to relevance.

This is where things get fuzzy, because relevance is a tricky notion. Nor is it easy to explain, especially when your CEO glares at you because your most-hated competitor ranks higher than your company during a Google search on your flagship product's name.

To understand the mechanisms involved, let's take a look at the players and what they do.

The Search Engine Companies

There are four main search engines that dominate the Web today: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Windows Live Search and Ask.com. Nearly every other search engine uses results from Google (such as AOL, Netscape and EarthLink) or Ask (MyWay, iWon).

The Web Spider
A search engine sends into the Internet an automated script, called a Web spider. It usually starts at a Web directory. (For example, Google uses the Open Directory Project, a free, volunteer-run directory located at http://dmoz.org.) The spider acts as a crawler that travels through websites via page links. It copies what it can of each webpage and sends that copy back to the search engine mother ship for indexing.

Here's the crux of the matter: Spiders feed on text. Not Flash, not JavaScript, not music, not images. Words.

Some spiders can process non-textual data to some extent, but they do not do it very well. Non-text capture and indexing is a direction for future development. For now, any website that depends on media other than text isn't receiving the benefits of the Web spider—and thus its search strategy is not achieving optimal results.

It is this tiny piece of technology that can dictate a website redesign and marketing campaign. The bottom line is if a company wishes a webpage, and the products or information on it, to be visible on a search engine, the webpage must be accessible and must have content visible to the spider. If you're focused on promoting new products on the Web, don't let your website rely primarily on rich media, because search engines won't pick it up.

The Index
As the search engine receives webpages, it parses the information, breaking it down into content and metadata. Each search engine has its own top-secret algorithm to analyze this data according to its own rules of relevancy, using mathematics, psychology, linguistics and informatics (not to mention Dad's secret chili recipe—hey, it could be anything, as it's top secret). Then this analysis is indexed and stored.

The Search Result Set
When a user enters topical words into a search engine—what you think of as keywords—the search engine consults its index and returns a ranked list of the most relevant page URLs, each accompanied by a short description or paragraph of text pulled from the webpage itself. Included on the results page are paid advertisements that also meet this relevancy evaluation.

The Searchers
Most searchers don't consider how they conduct their searches. As a result, they type into an engine a string of words, which may form a nonsensical keyword phrase, such as "underwater basket weaving left-handed India." One searcher may be looking for information on a college joke reference to an easy major; another may be seeking examples of artwork created using wet willow branches; and still another user may want a history of an actual sport that supposedly originated in India in the 1920s. These people, who dare to use their own logic instead of the orderly keywords you'd choose for them, are the cause of all your trouble, and are especially challenging for the copywriter who has to shoehorn that search phrase into Web content.

The SEM Specialist
The SEM specialist's primary job is to help you develop a website that wins high rankings, while simultaneously offering an innovative Internet experience that is irresistible to potential customers. Running paid search and link popularity campaigns are two other areas of the SEM specialist's responsibility; we'll get to those in a moment.