Search Engine Marketing – SEM

A search engine is primarily used to find relevant information on the internet. As a result, they are an essential element of Internet marketing campaigns by our search marketing agency, Crest Media and by many in Orange County and Los Angeles, California. Search Engine Marketing, also called SEM, is described as a type of Internet marketing that is used to increase the visibility of a particular website in search engine result pages (SERPs), such as in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

SEM is comprised of four major types of search advertising which include paid placement, paid inclusion or pay per click (PPC), contextual advertising and search engine optimization. Paid listings and search engine optimization (SEO) basically have the same goal; to promote and increase a website's visibility in the results pages of search engines and on the web. The processes and online marketing strategies that are used differ for all search marketing types, though they all use web analytics to optimize campaigns.

SEO focuses on optimizing a site to rank it on keywords and achieve natural or un-paid placement. Search engines use programs (called "spiders") to crawl websites analyzing content in order to rank them on search result pages. The ranking of the websites depends upon the attributes of the website. Attributes, such as title tags, meta tags, content, inbound links, submissions to directories, site maps, and anchor text among others, greatly contribute to the ranking of a website on a search result page that has been indexed for content found by the "spiders". Websites that rank high on the result pages are said to have a better return on investment.

Paid search advertising entails paying for each click on a text or image ad (also called banner ads) in search engines or on participating websites. Pay-Per-Click advertising (or PPC) uses different internet marketing strategies on search networks that may also include landing pages and various forms of tracking software to track visitors, conversions and other metrics to qualify leads and sales for a better ROI (return on investment). Advertisers only pay when their online advertisements are clicked; hence the name pay-per-click.

Aside from the basic online marketing solutions that Crest Media provides, we also offer specialized services such as reputation management, a form of search engine optimization. As its name suggests, reputation management is a service that involves displacing (if not, lessening) bad press or negative publicity to the second and third pages of search engine results with good and positive press or publicity.