Web Design & Development Ireland | Internet Marketing Ireland | Search Engine Optimisation | Web Positioning

Internet Marketing Ireland | Search Engine Marketing

Defining Internet Marketing / Search Engine Marketing

Internet Marketing, also referred to as search engine marketing, or online marketing, is all about using the internet, and in particular the search engines results pages, or SERPs, to advertise your products or services through your own web site. This is done primarily by purchasing sponsored listings on other sites, or opting into one of the major search engine's paid schemes. The birth of Internet Marketing can be traced back to 2001, when Overture was launched as the first PPC or 'pay per click' search engine.

Despite the fact that Internet Marketing is more expensive than natural Search Engine Optimisation, it is a form of Online Marketing that has enjoyed unprecedented growth since its inception, becoming the darling of advertisers. There are many reasons for its popularity, topmost of them is the speed and ease with which you can set up your campaign. Nowadays Overture has become Yahoo, and has ceded much of it's market share to the giant Google, whose own PPC system (Adwords) has been steadily increasing its market share, and now MSN has joined the battle. With the PPC industry currently raking over $3 billion annually from web site advertisers, we can expect even more competition in the future.

Search Engine Marketing | SEM is not SEO

It can be easy to mix up these two disparate methods of driving traffic to your web site, but the easist way to understand the distinction is perhaps to consider Search Engine Marketing as an additional last step of the overall Search Engine Optimisation process, or as a separate marketing strategy altogether. Search Engine Optimisation is by nature a gradual, ongoing process, relying as it does on adapting your web site design and content in such a way as to make it more attractive, and therefore more easily indexed and better ranked, to search engine spiders. This process entails a lot of work in the site's design and coding, and in the building and maintenance of favourable relationships with other online companies.

On the other hand, Search Engine Marketing appears to be a quick fix, but at a cost. Usually, SEM requires little or no extra work to be done on your site. Instead, your efforts are concentrated on the creation of banner or text ads, paying for their inclusion in the SERPs or on the pages of other sites, then monitoring closely how successful or not your campaign is, and altering and tweaking the campaign to ensure the best possible results.

Internet Marketing | Advantages of Online Marketing

There are some obvious advantages Internet Marketing has over Search Engine Optimization:
  • Tracking is easy. Rather than having to wait for months to see the effect of your camapign, the success of any given keyword can be measured within days. This is especially true of Google, thanks to their comprehensive Analytics program.
  • Guaranteed success. If you want your listing to be top, then you simply outbid your competitors.
  • Landing pages. Rather than being at the mercy of a search engine spider who may pull up pages of your web site that aren't exactly the page you might have chosen for that particular term, you can specify exactly where the visitor arrives on your site, and create pages that are wholly designed for a particular search term.
  • Immediacy. Your listing becomes active almost instantaneously.
  • No alterations. Your site can be top listed without having to make any changes to its content or layout.
  • No extra work. Its an auction, so you don't have to spend time ensuring that you've submitted it to all the right search engines and directories.

For a much more detailed discussion of exactly what Internet Marketing options are available to you, please click on the links below: