Search Engine Optimisation is becoming a bit of a dirty word, especially at the hallowed grounds of Google. Why? Because Joe Bloggs the toilet guy wants his website to come up when people search for cars, just in case the person wanting to buy a car also wants to buy a toilet. Joe doesn't care if a million people see his listing before somebody clicks on it, but the guy buying the car does. And so does Google.

The search engines don't want you to optmise your site for them - they want you to optimise it for the users, the people looking for your product or service. This is an important distinction to make because if you are optimising for the search engine, they will soon cotton on and all the changes your SEO consultant charged you a fortune to make will put you in opposition to the search engines policies.

Search engines use algorithms and a wide range of complex processes to try and provide users with search results that accurately match what the user was searching for. They keep a tight lid on how they do this but people do catch on from time to time. What follows is a frantic effort to get your site updated with the latest craze in Search Engine Optimisation, you will often experience a boost in traffic to your website, but the search engines move quickly too and they will penalise you for your efforts. If you are particularly unlucky you may end up languishing in Google Hell.

Our approach at eAffiliates™ is to optimise for the user, not for the search engine. Google provides a wide range of fantastic webmaster tools to enable you to optimise your website to an acceptable level and we use these tools as a guideline for what we can and can't do to your website.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine results pages. Google and Yahoo both offer Pay Per Click (PPC). Pay per click is an advertising model used on websites, advertising networks and search engines where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser's website. eAffiliates™ used Google Adwords to set up paid-for listing campaigns for our clients. You can easily do this yourself but it is time consuming and we offer it as part of our package which means you can stick to your core business.

SEM Market Structure

In 2006, North American advertisers spent US$9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising.

SEM History

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text in 1996 and then Goto.com in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007 pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers for search engines.

Search Engine Optimization consultants such as eAffiliates™ expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunites offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals. In 2007 Search Engine Marketing is Stronger than ever with SEM Budgets up 750% as shown with stats dating back to 2002 vs 2006.