Many Las Vegas business owners are just finding out about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and how it can benefit their Las Vegas website and while it is a relatively new way of marketing, the principles have been around for a long time.

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search Engine Optimization is the biggest buzzword right now especially when you talk of promoting yourc company’s website. But did you know that Search Engine Marketing is another important spoke in the business marketing wheel? The first thing you should know is that Search Engine Marketing, SEM is quite different from Search Engine Optimization or SEO. With this being said, you will find a lot of business people treating SEM the same as SEO.

The first thing that differs between SEO and SEM is the perception of Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Optimization works on the key words and key phrases and content of your website’s pages and how the pages need to be designed keeping Search Engines in mind and how they will rank on a search. Search Engine Marketing on the other hand deals exclusively with how you promote your website with search engines. It could be said that a Search Engine Optimization effort could be a subset of a Search Engine Marketing campaign.

Search Engine Marketing Techniques

Basically, any technique by which the visibility of a website improves with search engines is covered under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing. Thus, from an aggregate perspective, you could look at techniques like Blogging, Search Engine Submissions, Social Networking, Viral Marketing and other techniques. You could also look at methods like Contextual Advertising and Paid Inclusion being subsets of Search Engine Marketing.

Contextual Advertising

Not many are aware of the complete workings of contextual advertising. Here’s an example to illustrate the concept. Assume you have visited a website A, which is in the Sports niche. When you visit the website, you could see some ads popping up from the site that deals with sports accessories or memorabilia dealers. Basically, you see an ad which is relevant to the context and the content of that particular website. This is how contextual advertising works.

Now, how does the business owner benefit from these ads appearing on their website? Simple, the ad appearing on the webpage would have a revenue basis tied onto it depending on certain actions being performed by the users. For example, a webmaster could get paid if 100 users click on the ad, and so on.

Paid Inclusion and Pay-Per-Click Placement

There are some search engines on the internet that are very popular (google, aol, msn, yahoo), so popular that business owners and webmasters are inclined to invest some money to get into the directory of these resources just so that they have the opportunity to get ranked on the first page as a “sponsored listing” so they can get the traffic and recognition of coming up on the first page of a google search, let’s say. This is where Paid Inclusion or Pay-Per-Click placement comes into play.

A web master or web developer can set up a paid inclusion or pay-per-click campaign to help promote your website (or if you are so technically inclined, you could do it yourself as well). You choose the key words you’d like to rank for, set a budget and run your campaign. The main objective of this is to have some traffic through search engines.

With the above knowledge, you should be in a position to understand that Search Engine Marketing is separate from Search Engine Optimization. One of the best examples of SEM at work would be to see the working of Google AdWords, which best symbolizes Contextual Advertising.

At the end of the day, both the techniques increase the visibility and page rankings of your company’s website within the search engines.

There is no more imposing a proposition than to try to do your own Las Vegas marketing plan using only online resources. You might go to a website like: http://www.business.com/directory/advertising_and_marketing/. There you will find online resources that offer to help you to do a marketing plan that will produce results. The only thing that you will get from any of those online resources is targetted emails from groups of people who might be interested in what you are selling.

The actual email formatting will have to be done by you. The sending of emails to all of those targetted groups will have to be done by you. The feedback, if you are interested in knowing who actually got and read your email, will have to be done by you. The facts are that doing a marketing plan only by using online resources can be frustrating, expensive (since those lists of emails from targetted populations cost money to buy), and can produce little if any results that translate into money for your business.

The money that you spend for online resources to promote your business can be better used to hire a professional marketing person who can make your marketing goals a reality. An online marketing professional knows how to look for the contacts that he will use to develop your marketing plan. He will not need to spend countless hours, as you would, in looking for sites that sell the information that you will want. He will know what sites online have the information that he will use to make your marketing plan a smooth, quickly operable and profitable working solution to your business growth and profit.

If you have a marketing plan but are confused as to how to get it viewed by a wide online audience, you are best served by a professional marketing person who knows how to set up your advertising and how to send it out to a large online market. The decision of doing your own online marketing or of hiring a professional to do your online marketing has to be decided on financial considerations if you are a business person who keeps track of expenses and benefits from advertising.

If you pay more for email lists that cost you time and effort to make individual emails and even more money to buy services for online sites that create a program for you to send multiple emails than you would pay to get the services of a professional marketing expert, the choice is obvious. Hiring a professional to do your marketing is not only cost effective but time effective and the proof should be in your profits.

When starting a new business in Las Vegas, after your business plan, the most important plan you should create is your company’s marketing plan. You can hire a company or marketing professional to help write your marketing plan, however, if budget is an issue for you, there are many free online resources to help assist you in writing a solid marketing plan for your new Las Vegas business.

Let’s start with an overview of why a marketing plan is important (some online resources for your review):

• Why you need a marketing plan to achieve ultimate success
• Yes, you REALLY need a marketing plan
• Do you really need a marketing plan?
• Why do we need a marketing plan anyways?

Everybody wants free advice and that’s why I started the MarketinginLasVegas website and blog, to give you free advice, resources, tips and tricks on marketing your Las Vegas business or Las Vegas company.  While you may not find a truly free online marketing consultant to work with (wouldn’t that be great?) there are so many marketing consultants who have written articles online and free websites with marketing advice and resources all available at your fingertips if you search on google.

Here are some great free resources for marketing and online marketing resources, strategies and tactics:

• Free Marketing Advice from whatsnextonline.com
• Small Business Marketing Advice – BusinessTown.com
• Small Business Marketing TIps – Internet Marketing Advice – Internet Marketing Guides
• Affiliate Marketing Suggestions and Advice – WebProNews.com
• Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Plans and Careers – About.com
• Marketing Online Resources at Education Index
• Business Marketing Strategy Essentials
• Examples of Marketing Strategies
• Free Internet Marketing Tips / Articles
• Top Ten Online Marketing Tactics
• Six Marketing Tactics Worth Paying For – Forbes.com
• Social Media Marketing Tactics & Resources
• Sample Marketing Plan – MoreBusiness.com
• How to Write a Marketing Plan, Samle Marketing Plans – KnowThis.com
• The Marketing Mix – The 4 P’s of Marketing
• Online Marketing Resource Center, Case Studies, Email Guides – eROI.com
• Internet Marketing Campaign – 5 Step Internet Marketing Plan