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.

Internet Marketing can really encompass several different concepts or terms – online marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), website marketing, to name a few. Whichever terms you’ve heard before is not too important; the important take-away is that you need to promote your business online, grow traffic to your website, create an awareness and brand your business online, improve your search engine result rankings and make the Las Vegas community aware that your company even exists.

Many companies and businesses in Las Vegas make the mistake of launching a website and thinking that drones of visitors will magically arrive each day. Not true. Just like a business card that sits in your pocket if you don’t hand it out to people, most of the time a website can sit out on the internet and if you don’t market that web site, people may not even know you or your business exists.

Here are some ways you or a professional internet marketing company can help market your business online:

• Launch a Website – if you don’t already have a web site you are WAY behind the curve.  Get one up right away.
• Search Engine Optimization – research keywords and key phrases that people would find your website during a search on a search engine and put those words and phrases into the copy on your website, make those same words links between your website pages and place those same words into your website’s site map.
• Online PR – There are many opportunities for online PR and Press Releases. For more information see my article on Press Releases for Your Las Vegas Business.
• Google’s Free Online Marketing Tools – here’s a list from wikipedia.org. Very helpful and mostly free.
• Pay-Per-Click Campaign – ever wonder what those Sponsored Listings are when you search on google, yahoo, msn or aol? That’s right, they pay. You can set up your own campaign, choose they keywords, set your monthly budget and start coming up right along side your competitors by setting a pay-per-click campaign.
• Email Marketing – Use a company like Constant Contact to set up an email marketing campaign. You can upload your list of contacts, choose a template and write your email newsletter, it’s easy and fun.
• Launch a Blog – Do you have a lot to say about your particular area of expertise or industry (like I do, hee)? Then launch a blog and tell visitors what you’re thinking and let them find out who you are and what your business specializes in.
• Banner Advertising – Consider buying space on a targeted web site that promotes your products and services. Set up a special landing page so you can track the results

The following is a listing of the top Ten Search Engines, on which your Las Vegas website should be listed on. Do a search for yourcompany.com and see!

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. MSN
4. AOL
5. Microsoft Live Search
6. Ask
7. Alta Vista
8. Excite
9. AlltheWeb
10. Lycos

Search engine marketing is a kind of marketing that helps websites be seen by viewers. It is like the yellowpages but for the millions of websites floating around now a days on the internet. How it works is that a website will be created by an owner and then a search engine will be chosen. There are quite a few to choose from such as Yahoo, Google and Inbox, ones that charge per customer view and ones that are free. Keywords or tags will be entered for the website in the search engine so when a someone who is seeking a specific thing can type in a keyword and a list of websites with those keywords will be populated with a brief description of what is in that website. Website owners can choose to boost their websites to the top of the list by purchasing Pay Per Clicks which is why you always see the most popular sites at the beginning. The more money you pay for pay per clicks the more likely that your website will be seen over and over again.

For an example of how a search engine works say I am going on a trip to Las Vegas. I need to find a hotel but I need to some reviews also. In the search bar I would type ‘hotels las vegas reviews’. It would populate a list of popular hotel websites and websites that have reviews on these hotels or both in one website. All of this took about 30 seconds. Today time is money and most people want things as quick as possible which makes search engines a valuable resource.

Search engines can be detrimental to a businesses success since a good majority of people have access to the Internet and prefer using it for quick finds for vacations as well as other things. With a few keywords into a search engine a potential customer can have names of hotels, resteraunts, places and things to do, shows, pictures, show clips and other tourist points of interest at their fingertips in a matter of seconds with a list of reviews from previous customers. These 5-10 minutes of a person looking at their website can quickly result in a decision of the customer. If the website is very resourceful then you have the domino effect happen to where word of mouth will happen boosting the sales of that website.

So from one person typing in a few keywords can have a major impact on a websites future since people now a days would rather purchase or gather information from a website rather than another source such as the yellowpages or newspapers. They get it all online.

Search engine marketing (SEM), is going to make or break your business in Las Vegas. Relax, maybe you know a couple million people and can do the word of mouth thing. For those of us who would rather keep our voice, there is search engine marketing.

This method of marketing is designed to increase your websites chances of being found by consumers on internet search engines. This is done by using key words and key phrases that best describe your site. The design of your site also plays an important role in search engine marketing. The design of your site is important because it will help your sites ranking in the search engines. This can be done through using key words within your site. This includes META tags, titles, and even images. Keywords will prove to be your best friend with SEM. These key words and key phrases can appear when visitors to google perform a search and your Las Vegas website could appear.

I use search engines as if they are going out of business. The statistics prove that most internet users are under this impression as well. Most people who utilize the web will use a search engine to find what they are looking for. This involves using key words to find the best that the web has to offer. If your site is within the top 30 ranked for your particular niche, you are one of the best. If you are not, I might still click in to see why you are ranked so high. You might even get me to do some impulse buying. That is the point of search engine marketing. You need key words that will attract people to your site.

If you sell collectable cars, the word car is obviously a keyword. I have to warn you however, you will bid higher on such a popular word. Yes, you have to bid on key words. That is a part of advertising and business, we all know that. The more you spend, the more face time you get. A part of search engine marketing is also finding the best deals.

The best deals will of course be words that no one else might think of. As slim as that possibility might sound, with a little creativity you can think of phrases such as “loud cars” or “pretty cars”. I am sure you can be more creative than I am, but you get the drift. You will pay less, and will of course attract more traffic to your website.

Improving Search Engine Rankings for Your Las Vegas Website

For many, the traffic to and from a website is the most important part of the internet marketing process for your Las Vegas web site. Without visitors and traffic, many sites cannot flourish and the information on them is then meaningless. To increase the number of visitors and traffic to a website, many businesses turn to search engines, hoping that if their site appears more often or closer to the top in a search, that the traffic will increase. 

One way of doing this is referred to as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This process attempts to improve visitor rates “naturally” by alter the content and presentation of information on the site itself, hoping to increase how many keywords the site falls under in a search. For example, if a site were to be originally focused on horse breeding, this site would probably only appear in searches for that specific keyword: horse breeding. Applying SEO, the site host would add articles concerning horse breeds, care and up keeping of horses, feed options, etc. All of these all still fall under the category of horse breeding, but the site will now appear in a number of other searches with different keywords separate from just horse breeding. Unfortunately, many sites use SEO to draw people into spam sites, referred to in the industry at “black hat SEO”. These sites attempt to fall into as many keyword categories as possible, so as to appear as options in as many searches as possible and be seen by as many people as possible. While not necessarily illegal, this use of SEO is considered against internet ethics; it is, however, a good way of explaining and understanding the SEO process.

Another option of optimizing the number of visitors to a site is SEM, or search engine marketing. Unlike SEO, SEM does not alter the actually content of the page. Rather, it places paid advertisements for the site on search engines. Put any keyword you can think of into Google Search and hit enter. On the right side of the page at least five little advertisements will appear, each with at least on of the words from your keyword search in it, even if it doesn’t make any sense. This is an application of SEM. By paying Google to host their site as an ad, websites increase their visibility and, hopefully, their visitor rate.