by Matt Genna

Imagine getting into your car, backing out of your drive way, but not being able to drive to your destination because the road is blocked off. What do you do? You now have little to no options but tons of frustration; this is what it would be like if there were no search engines available.

In this case, the car symbolizes a person’s idea or need, while the road symbolizes a search engine. Search engines help people navigate the World Wide Web efficiently, bringing the most relevant results to the user based on what they were looking for. Luckily, we are privileged enough to use such a tool in our daily lives as long as you have access to an internet connection.

Many times a company or business will find themselves wondering why their website isn’t at the top of the list when searching vaguely for the type of service or product they’re providing, and nine times out of ten it is because they haven’t properly done any research on Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Search Engine Marketing is a process of internet marketing that uses paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion to help increase a websites visibility in a search engine result page.

It has been said that 93% of the users who use search engines will not look past the second page of the search results that they will acquire. This is why many companies and businesses care about where their website will land after searching for a specific market that they dabble in within a search engine. But it isn’t always the top results being the first to be clicked on, search engines also could help you generate traffic to your website through the advertisements being shown on the search engine results page or through sponsored link pages based on keywords in the users search, this is known as Contextual Advertising. Contextual Advertising is the process in which marketers will place ads on various websites that are similar to their products or services, mainly to catch the user’s eye that is browsing the other website, but is interested in the same topic. For example, if a user is viewing a website pertaining to sports memorabilia, and an ad pops up relating to a sale on baseball cards, this is Contextual Advertising. Companies use this method all the time, and search engines realize how valuable of an asset this is and will charge the company for the amount of times that a user will click on any of these advertisements; this is what is known as Paid Inclusion or Pay Per Click. This is a better way of marketing in my opinion because you will only be paying for something that will show results, while increasing your ranking on search engines due to the traffic that is being generated through all these types of outlets.