The importance of SEM for you website

SEM, or , is the primary way website owners promote their businesses and products. While search engine marketing is a complex area, this article will attempt to demystify the process, as well as show you a couple of ways to get started effectively marketing your website for search engines.

Please note that this article is not about paid SEM, like is utilized by Google AdWords. This article will deal primarily about ways you can increase your search engine visibility for little or no money. While there is no magic way to increase your search engine visibility overnight, these techniques will, in time, increase your rankings when people search for your site.

There are two major components of search engine marketing, keywords and relevance. Keywords are king when it comes to finding your website and promoting your products. When a user goes to search for something, they will enter several keywords. How search engines rank your page against said keywords is known as relevance. The higher your perceived relevance to the chosen keyword, the higher you will turn up in search results. Successfully utilizing your keywords in the page titles, product descriptions and links will increase your relevance to search engines, and your page rank will go up.

Page rank is a Google term for how visible your website is. All manner of things can affect this, including the amount of traffic you receive to your site, the number of incoming links to your site, how long your site has been around and so on.

When determining your keywords, it is vital to research what keywords your competitors are using, as well as what keywords your potential customers use when searching for your product or service. Generating a successful keyword list takes time, and you will often have to modify as you begin to see what keywords are working and what keywords are not. There are several free apps online that can generate keywords for you, see what the price per click for each keyword is, and even show you what keywords your competitors are using.

Next on the list is the popularity and saturation of your website. Your popularity is determined by the number of times a link to your site has been indexed by a search engine. This is used to approximate the amount of traffic you have received, as well as indicate how relevant your page is when compared to the keywords.

Saturation is determined by the quantity of pages on your website that have been indexed, and again the number of those pages that contain the keywords the user is searching for. Popularity and saturation take time to acquire, and often the results of a successful link building campaign can take many months to bear fruit.

As you are building links make sure you only use quality sites to link from. Never spam message boards or blogs, but take time to build quality links with people whom you have built a relationship with. Many times people in similar, though not competing businesses will trade links. This is a great way to increase your websites popularity, and will result in you showing up higher in search engine results.

While traditional SEM requires money in a pay-per-click form, you can successfully market your website using a few simple techniques that will increase your ranking in search engine results. You can successfully market your business for little or no money if you take the time to understand SEM strategies.  Knowing your keywords and building your site popularity are the first steps toward building a successful online presence for your business.