Blog#1

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing is online internet marketing that relates to the use of searching within a search engine. It is made up of two parts, Search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) advertising.  SEO is the practice that aims to improve a web site's ranking in the search engine for specific keywords. For example, if one searches for shoes in a search engine, a certain listing of websites with that word will show up and that listing result depends on how much those websites pay google to advertise for that specific keyword.

PPC on the other hand is advertising on search engines where the advertiser pays only for each click on their advertisement. So, for example, Zappos will pay google a certain amount of money when someone clicks on their website if say they were searching for shoes.

These two concepts are important to the advertiser as choices or platforms to maximize benefits from advertising. They provide quantifiable means with which the advertiser can use to determine the effectiveness of their advertising campaign.

One of the issues or concerns with this form of advertising can be with certain keywords. If a small startup say in the business of selling shoes will not have resources to afford the cost of advertising using words like shoes because the bigger companies will drive up the cost of these words.

PPC can be misleading at times. The advertiser will pay for the clicks but sometimes those clicks might lead to sales. A lot of people might click on the advertisement, go to the website and maybe just “window-shop”

The main skillset that I acquired through this session is the full understanding of online advertising, the concepts behind it and how advertisers can use it to maximize their advertising budgets also some challenges that exist with it.

My main take away is that am excited to be exposed with this new trend of marketing and I want to learn more about it so I can fully understand how businesses can take full advantage of it. There are definitely challenges with using these tools especially for your everyday person and eager to learn ways to overcome this problem.

http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-sem