Well, yes, for the first time you’d find that if you Google my name “Mario Sundar” you’d be led to my blog directly. This is quite an important milestone for my blog and is quite a change from earlier when you would get tons of mindless links when you googled me. What’s more interesting is that you can reach my blog by searching for keywords like “web 2.0 marketing“, “marketing evangelist“, etc… on the 1st page of search results itself!

THIS is the power of “Search Engine Marketing”. If any blogger can get so much relevance through the simple act of blogging on topics he/she is passionate about, imagine how important it is for Fortune 500 corporations to enable search engines to lead to their company’s products/services when you search for agnostic terms related to them.

Let’s take a quick 3-point tour of Search Engine Marketing and how essential it is for marketers like ourselves?:

1. What is Search Engine Marketing?: According to Wikipedia

In Internet marketing, search engine marketing, or SEM, is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages.

Imagine, leading a team of marcom experts for your Fortune 500 company. Let’s say you create a set of extremely well crafted set of exquisite brochures, customer case studies, white papers, etc… and when your target audience searches for the product category what shows up first is your competition’s web page results! Since the web is the focus of most shoppers/consumers, it’s imperative that your product team be right up there as search result numero uno…

2. How do you achieve that?:

Three ways:

(i) Search Engine Optimization:

improving rankings for relevant keywords in search results by rectifying the website structure, and content

If you’d like to select keywords while crafting content on your website, feel free to check out tools that will enable you to find out which keyword is more popular vs. the other: Google Keywords, Yahoo Keyword Placement Tool, Google Trends, etc…

(ii) Search Engine Advertising:

paying the search engine company for a guaranteed high ranking or an ad displayed aside the results

I am not sure this has as much of a desired effect as an organic search result. Check out Google Ads and Yahoo Publisher Network for more info on how to go about it. Here’s a neat comparison of the two top ad services, which you can find on the Search Engine Guide blog

(iii) Paid inclusion:

paying the search engine company for a guarantee that the website is included in their natural search index

3. Resources:

(i) 2 Pros: I’ve had a chance to chat with Bill Hunt, CEO of Global Strategies International, a Search Engine Marketing agency during a recent SVAMA event. Bill is the co-author of the definitive guide to corporate Search Engine Marketing – “Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site”

Search Engine Marketing’s Blog – check it out here.

Mike Moran, the other author of the SEM book has his blog. Check it out here.

(ii) A Pro in the making: I just recently blogged about Neil Patel’s take on Riya’s makeover. A critique that was probably the last straw and one that probably culminated in Munjal Shah (Riya) announcing a competition to redesign the website.

Neil probably will come up with a design and my bet is on his winning the competition.

Check out his website here, and his blog here.