Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing refers to a set of Internet marketing strategies designed to promote traffic to your website. SEM focuses on promoting your site to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN either by bidding on keywords in a Pay Per Click marketing campaign, paid inclusion programs or through search engine optimisation. Search Engine Marketing often works best as a combination of both Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click campaigns.
Pay per Click Programs such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing enable you to bid against relevant keywords. If someone performs a search using these keywords a link to your site appears as a "Sponsored Link" within the search results.
Your adverts appear free of charge and you only pay if someone actually clicks through to your site. PPC campaigns can be extremely effective in driving traffic to your site. They can be set up quickly and if enough thought has been given to the keywords you target, the pages they link to ("landing pages") and the promotional text you use they can be highly effective at generating leads. Grants are available to charities for certain schemes.
It is essential that you regularly monitor and review the keywords you target and your bidding for them. If a keyword does not go on to convert and generate leads on your website you may end up wasting a lot of money in driving irrelevant traffic to your website.
