What is it?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is about getting your website found. The objective is to increase the levels of high quality, targeted traffic to your website. It covers a multitude of activities including Link building, Internet advertising, Social networking and bookmarking and Directory submissions. We like to seperate Search engine optimisation (SEO) as a different strategy altogether.

Link building

Link building involves many different types of activities all of which are intended to grow the number and quality of inbound links to your website and to specific pages within your site. The purpose of link building is a) to boost the rankings of specific web pages whilst raising the overall profile of your website in the search engines and b) to drive visitors directly from other websites to yours. It makes sense therefore to aim for getting links from websites that already have significant traffic.

Lots of people think of Google and the other search engines almost exclusively when thinking about promoting their websites. However, when you consider that Facebook each day now receives more visitors than Google, you can easily see the limiting nature of this way of thinking.

The importance of link building as part of any Search engine marketing strategy cannot be understated. In today's online environment, it is next to impossible to rank highly for any but the least competitive phrases without some level of links leading to your site.

But the question is: how do you get those oh-so-vital links? And how do you make sure that those links are of a good enough quality for the search engines to class them as being significant?

There are a number of strategies that you can adopt to increase the link counts into your website. Again, we have the skills and knowledge to be able to manage a complete Link building strategy for your business, including a thorough understanding of the proprietary Google technologies of PageRank and TrustRank as well as the more common technologies of relevance, location, context and anchor texts.

We have considerable experience in managing link exchange strategies, link baiting and paid link management.

Internet advertising

Advertising on other websites is now offered by millions of website owners. In particular, contextual advertising is available from many service providers, such as Google Ads, Overture and Yahoo.

The idea is that your adverts are delivered based on the content of the page that is carrying the ad. This allows you to, in some cases, very precisely target your audience for your adverts and have them distributed across websites that specifically cater for the same audience that you're aiming for.

This form of advertising is a fast-growing market and one that is a very significant part of SEM over time.

Social networking and bookmarking

This is an often-overlooked and under-utilised area of Search engine marketing. At UnderDesign we have identified over 150 high-traffic, hugely popular websites from Facebook to Furl that are great for obtaining inbound links to your website for free and for generating huge volumes of traffic as well as great search engine rankings.

Directory submissions

Directory submission involves the submission of websites to general purpose and specific web directories. Many of these are free and many more operate on a subscription or a pay-per-click basis but they all offer the primary benefit of driving traffic to your website and assisting (in varying degrees) with your search engine rankings.

In January 2009, we will be publishing our first edition of Top Internet Directories listing the best directories that we know of (based on their traffic levels, link popularity and search engine friendliness). Most of these directories are free - you don't have to pay for a listing.

New directories appear all the time and we'll be adding more in future editions of Top Internet Directories and there will always be a large number of vertical or topic-specific directories related to your website. If you want us to, we can research the available directories within your market. Simply complete the form at the foot of this page.

If you think that Search engine marketing could be an important strategy for your business and your business website, then why not give us a call or drop us a line and arrange an informal chat with one of our SEM specialists.