Facts, Fiction and views by valuepitchers

What is search engine marketing?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is defined as a form of marketing on the Internet. It basically comprises all the activities which are aimed at the promotion of a website and increasing its visibility in the SERP (search engine results pages). It has been proved that SEM has a high return on investment (ROI).

What is SEMPO?

SEMPO is the acronym for the professional non-profit organisation that was set up in the year 2003 to act as the governing body for search engine marketers. The full form of SEMPO is the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation.

What are the methods of search engine marketing?

There are basically three methods of search engine marketing. They are search engine optimisation, paid placement and paid inclusion.

Search engine optimisation: Search engine optimisation (SEO) is defined as the process by which the volume and quality of traffic from a search engine to a website via natural search results can be improved. Natural search results are also known as organic search results or algorithmic search results.

According to various sources, including the New York Times, search engine marketing is defined as the practice of purchasing paid search listings. It is different from search engine optimisation, which is basically aimed at obtaining better free search listings.

Paid placement: Paid placement is also known as pay per click (PPC). It is defined as a model of advertising which is found on websites, advertising networks and search engines. The advertisers pay only when a user actually clicks on an advertisement in order to visit the website of the advertiser. Advertisers bid on a set of keywords which they expect their target market to type in the search bar in order to look for a specific product or service. The advertiser's advertisement is likely to appear on any of the pages of search results when the user types a keyword query that matches the list of keywords that the advertiser has at his or her disposal.

Paid inclusion: Paid inclusion is the term used to refer to an SEM product in which a search engine firm charges a fee which is related to the inclusion of a website in its search index. A majority of the search engine companies of the world, excluding Google, provide paid inclusion products.

What is the market structure of search engine marketing?

In the year 2006, it was estimated that advertisers from the continent of North America spent approximately 9.4 billion United States dollars on SEM. It was an increase of approximately 62 per cent over the year 2005 and an increase of approximately 750 per cent over the year 2002.

Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter are called the Big Three, as they are the three largest vendors of search engine marketing in the world. In the year 2006, SEM had a faster rate of growth than the traditional methods of advertising.

Tracing the history of search engine marketing

The number of websites increased between the mid-1990's and the late-1990's. It was because of the rapid increase in the number of websites that search engines began to appear during this period. This made it easy for people to find information at a much faster rate.

These search engines also made it easier for various business models to finance their services. For instance, Open Text offered pay per click programs in the year 1996 and Goto.com offered a similar program about two years later.

In the year 2001, Goto.com was rechristened Overture. Yahoo! Purchased Overture two years later. It now provides advertisers the opportunities for paid search through Yahoo! Search Marketing.

In the year 2000, Google started offering the Google AdWords program, through which Google could offer advertisements on its search results pages. By the year 2007, it was proved that pay per click programs generate the largest amount of income for search engines.

Consultants in the field of search engine optimisation continue to expand their services so that they can help businesses learn more about the advertising opportunities that search engines offer and use them. It is because of SEO that a number of new firms have emerged in recent years, which focus mainly on using search engines to undertake marketing and advertising activities.

The term search engine marketing was first coined by Danny Sullivan, who proposed it in the year 2001. It is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of activities, such as performing search engine optimisation, managing paid listings on search engines, submitting a list of websites to online directories and developing online marketing strategies that can help businesses, firms and individuals market themselves better.

Search engine marketing is growing at a much faster rate in the year 2007. The budgets for search engine marketing activities have increased by approximately 750 per cent as compared to those in the previous five years.

Ethical aspects

From time to time, critics have expressed their doubts about the ethics in the paid search advertising industry. There is a raging controversy about the number of search engines that actually present advertisement on their pages of search results.

This issue has often been raised and is the target of a number of studies and reports by an agency called Consumer Reports WebWatch and another agency called Consumers Forum. (Consumers Forum is an independent non-profit organisation involved in the activities of testing and providing information that serves the interests of consumers in the United States of America.)

The FTC is another body which issued a letter to this effect in the year 2002. The letter dealt with the need to disclose paid advertising on search engines, and was issued in response to a complaint filed by a body called Commercial Alert. This body is a group involved in consumer advocacy, and it is known for its close links to Ralph Nader, the well-known attorney and political activist.

People associated with the SEMPO

The founding members of SEMPO are Barbara Coll of WebMama.com Inc., Dana Todd of SiteLab International Inc., Kevin Lee of Did-It, Noel McMichael of Marketleap (which Digital Impact later acquired), Christine Churchill of Key Relevance, Frederick Marckini of iProspect, Jessie Stricchiola of Alchemist Media and Brett Tabke of WebMasterWorld. Tabke was added as a member of the board of directors soon after SEMPO was launched.

Danny Sullivan (who coined the term search engine marketing) briefly served as one of the founding members of the association's board of directors, and then served as one of the original members of the board of advisors. Chris Sherman of Search Day, Dan Boberg of Overture, Chris LaSala of Google and Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray were the other members of the original board of advisors to SEMPO.

Profiles of three important personalities associated with the field of search engine marketing

Barbara Coll: Barbara Coll was born in the year 1960. She was brought up in the city of Ottawa, the capital of Canada and graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering from Carelton University in the year 1986. She moved to Silicon Valley in the state of California in the United States of America and worked with giants in the field of information technology such as Sun Microsystems and Ipsilon, before founding WebMama.com Inc. in the month of September in the year 1996. WebMama helps people understand the importance of search generated traffic. Coll, a resident of the city of Menlo Park, California, is married and is the mother of one child, a son. WebMama has its headquarters in the city of Palo Alto, California.

Brett Tabke: Brett Tabke is a programmer and search engine optimisation professional from the United States of America. He is the founder of WebMasterWorld, which is an online search engine and a forum for marketing activities on the Internet. He began his career as a software developer for Commodore home computers and then worked for such companies as Epyx and Berkeley Softworks (the makers of the GEOS operating system), which was later rechristened to GeoWorks. The first bulletin board system stated by Tabke in the year 1984 had a 300-baud modem on a dial-up connection. In the year 1996, he moved on to the Internet and web technologies. Tabke lives with his wife Erika in the city of Austin, which is located in the state of Texas. He met Erika online on his forum. The couple has a pet llama, which has been brought up on a diet of green ham and eggs. It is interesting, but ironic, that Tabke does not know how to code.

Danny Sullivan: Danny Sullivan (whose first name is Danny, not Daniel) was born in the year 1965 in the city of Newport Beach in the state of California in the United States of America. He is the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, which he founded in the year 2006. It is a blog that contains news and information about search engines. He is the chief content officer and partner of Third Door Media, the firm that owns Search Engine Land and other companies related to search, including Search Marketing Now and Search Marketing Expo. The former is a provider of webcasts and organiser of live as well as on demand web seminars, also known as webinars, about search marketing. The latter is a conference on search engine marketing. Married with two sons, Sullivan is an alumnus of the University of California in the city of Irvine and has worked with the BBC for a year in England. He also worked as a reporter for such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register. Sullivan then moved to a village called Chitterne in England, where he lives with his wife and sons. He started A Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines in the month of April in the year 1996 and a website called Search Engine Watch in the month of June in the year 1997. The latter provided tips on how to get good search engine results. He sold it to MecklerMedia (now called Jupitermedia) for an undisclosed amount in the month of November in the year 2006.He has successfully organised a conference on search engine strategies (SES) six times each year during his stint as the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Watch, prior to its sale to Incisive Media for approximately 43 million United States dollars. Each of these SES conferences has been attended by between 1, 500 and 6, 000 people. He entered into an agreement with Jupitermedia to participate in the SES conferences in the year 2007.

The role of the SEMPO

Representation of a large number of companies, outreach and education, expanding and influencing the SEM industry: SEMPO represents more than five hundred firms located all over the world. It is associated with initiatives aimed at supporting a two-pronged general mission, namely outreach and education. These initiatives are, in turn, aimed at expanding and influencing the search engine marketing industry.

Public service, information, education, research, case studies, webinars, learning materials: It serves the public by providing free information, such as research, case studies, webinars and learning materials related to search engine marketing.

SEMPO institute, training programs and courses, involvement with the global SEM community: The SEMPO institute has recently been launched. It conducts courses and training programs in search marketing. SEMPO is basically a way to get involved with other members of the search engine marketing community all over the world and to further the mission of the search engine marketing industry, which is growing in leaps and bounds.

Committees, research, education, global working groups, metrics/standards: The members of SEMPO are also the members of various committees, including the research committee, the education committee, the global working groups committee and the metrics/standards committee. These committees are open to all the members of the association. They work on a wide range of activities and are committed to a number of issues pertaining to the search engine marketing industry.

SEMPO's annual state of the search market survey: SEMPO conducts a survey every year, which is known as the Annual State of the Search Market Survey. It is widely covered by the press and is subject to in-depth analysis by experts from the search engine marketing industry. It is one of the largest research studies conducted by search engine marketing analysts in the North American market, and has become a benchmark for similar studies in other parts of the world as well. The year 2007 is the third year since the inception of the survey. The search engine markets in Japan and Europe will also conduct similar studies in the year 2007.

Educational resources, promotion of the SEM industry: SEMPO plays a crucial role in providing educational resources to its members and consumers and promoting the search engine marketing industry.

SEMPO's sponsors

The association is sponsored by all the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, SuperPages.com, Search Engine Strategies and Atlas. The members of SEMPO not only includes firms that belong to the search engine marketing industry, but also consultants from the industry, website developers, in-house marketing professionals and advertising agencies.

Many search engines have search engine marketing programs. These not only include the global search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live and Ask.com, but also the ones that are specific to a particular country. The country-specific search engines include Baidu (a search engine from China) and Yandex and Rambler, the two Russian search engines.

Conclusion

There is no doubt about the future of search engine marketing. The search engine marketing industry is growing at a very rapid rate, and its future appears to be very bright. With an increase in the number of Internet users all over the world, marketing professionals can now tap the potential of the worldwide web as a powerful marketing tool.

As far as the SEMPO is concerned, the role it plays in organising the search engine marketing industry is commendable. If the rapid strides it has made in the SEM industry are any indication, the membership and the responsibilities of the association are likely to grow manifold in the future, and experts in the SEM industry can expect an even better performance from SEMPO in the years to come.