Search Engine Marketing Articles

All you need to know about Pay for Placement
In the never-ending race to online supremacy, if you wish to outbid some of your competitors in obtaining higher keyword positions, you should have a good look at Pay for Placement (PFP) ad programs. In contrast with other online marketing programs, PFP is more like an ongoing auction, where your competing advertisers, not the search engines, fix the going keyword bid rate. The nice thing about Pay for Placement is that it’s fairly easy to manage and it is usually affordable for many small online businesses.

Converting casual surfers into buyers
When a person uses a search engine to find a specific product or service, he or she types in a keyword or a keyword phrase in the search box. When he or she sees your ad listing, they will click on it and visit your website for more information. Will they buy from you? Maybe not, but they have certainly done the first step right. In order for them to buy something from your website, make sure you have a landing page that is convincing and that will encourage them to click on the "Buy Now" button. Today more than ever, landing pages must sell them on the features and benefits of the products or services offered on your site. Even if you don't sell anything tangible, the landing page still needs to do the job.

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Eight ways to target better sales in your SEM campaigns
In traditional print advertising or similar ad vehicles, companies pay for the number of people who are supposed to see the ad, or at least that is what is supposed to happen. With search engine marketing, companies participating in a PPC (Pay per Click) program such as Google’s AdWords or Overture, these companies are actually paying the search engines each time people click on their ads.

All you need to know about Fixed Placement Advertising
There are many advantages to using Fixed Placement Advertising in your paid online marketing campaigns. As one might expect, there are also a few drawbacks. But all in all, you should carefully evaluate fixed placement as a good source for additional traffic to your website. As you can probably tell from the name, the definition of fixed placement advertising can be summed up as a text link that is locked into a specific position, among other paid listings on the search results page. Fixed placement means that your ad generally does'nt move.

Choosing the right keywords for maximum ROI
Today, for a company or ad agency to be truly successful in search engine marketing (SEM), choosing the right keywords that people are actually typing into Overture or the other search engines can mean the difference between a very rewarding online ad campaign, or one that fails miserably. However, it is fortunate that selecting the right keywords that will drive targeted and qualified sales leads to your website is a fairly simple exercise. Using Overture, Google's AdWords or any other similar PPC program, marketers can easily delete keywords that don't produce the desired results, add new ones or modify the ones that currently exist, by simply accessing their accounts at any of these search engines.

Keyword trademark infringements and how to protect your company
On May 19, 2004, auto insurance company Geico sued Google and Overture for allegedly violating its trademarks in search-related advertisements, in the latest legal salvo against the Internet companies. The insurer charged the two companies with infringing on its trademarks when they sold them as keywords to Geico's rivals, so that the protected terms could appear in sponsored search results. According to the suit, that practice causes consumer confusion, in violation of the Lanham Act, the primary federal law covering trademark registration and protection. This isn't the first time Google, Overture or other PPC search engines get into legal trouble over keyword trademark infringement issues. This trend is actually expected to grow, as more and more companies discover the high conversion features of keywords using major brand names or trademarks. Smart trademark owners have always been vigilant and continue to engage in all forms of trademark protection battles. However, with the number of trademark infringements involving branded keywords steadily increasing at an alarming rate, search engines have started to respond and take action. Google and Overture now post on their websites specific copyright and trademark infringement complaint procedures, along with detailed instructions on how to go about this growing problem. Most search engines today will remove competitors' paid listings of registered trademark owners who lodge an official infringement complaint.

Specialized markets and vertical search engines
Conventional search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo direct Web visitors to some of the sites related to their search query. Since about two years, specialized search engines now offer paid listings on their own search results pages. A good example of this would be comparison shopping search engines such as Biz Rate, Yahoo Shopping and Froogle. Comparison shopping search engines act as online "traffic destination sites" to help shoppers find the products they are looking for. Such shopping portals also help compare prices on specific items, lengths of manufacturer's warranties, sizes, colours, etc. On comparison shopping search engines, merchants and their individual sites are defined as the content. Participating merchants have the option of engaging further, by buying additional search results, or participating in a PPC campaign. By definition, on traditional content websites or informational portals, the information on them is considered the content. Such sites are usually very topic-oriented and can simply act as specialized or vertical market search engines for certain types of specific advertisers. When prospective clients or visitors perform a search in Google or Yahoo, these people could represent a high percentage of your selected target audience and those are the ones you really need to concentrate your marketing efforts on.