This is what you need to know about SEM

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When the term SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, was introduced into business lingo just over a decade ago, it was used as a blanket term for any kind of marketing or targeted advertising that would allow companies to expose their websites to a wider audience on search engine results pages. Now, however, the term has expanded and evolved to mean something slightly different.

Now when we speak about SEM, we take it as referring to the practice of utilizing paid advertising, such as Google’s ‘AdWords’, or Bing Ads. These products allow companies to target keywords and other statistics such as frequency of searches, location based searches, and more in order to have adverts and links to their websites and pages appear within the search results on popular search engines.

In most cases, search engines will charge a minimal fee in order to host the advert, and an additional fee based on how many times the link is actively clicked from the search results page. In this sense, advertisers pay more for their advert if it does well, but that is supplemented by more traffic to their site, and therefore potentially more sales and exposure.

Search Engines usually have two different sections on their search pages available for advertising - a designated bar at the top of the page, allowing users to clearly see that what they are being presented with are adverts, and those that are integrated into the list of results itself. While these look like regular search results, and are usually always relevant to the search terms that were entered, they do have a disclaimer showing that they are paid advertisements.

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Using SEM for your business website: Is it worth it?

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In order to optimize your business website to take advantage of the full scope of the power of search engines, you will need to understand the basic idea behind Search Engine Marketing. One of the biggest buzz terms around these days is “Search Engine Optimization", more commonly known as SEO, yet this is only part of your potential arsenal when it comes to creating an online presence for your company.

While SEO focuses on getting your website itself ready for user interaction, and helps ensure that your website is visible in the search results that appear when users type in certain keywords, there are also more direct ways of getting your brand out there. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is most commonly identified as paying to have your website advertised when certain keywords are typed into a search engine.

While SEM is actually a collective term that encompasses all aspects of online marketing including SEO, pay per click advertising and various other online marketing tools. It is important to remember that your first priority when creating a website should be to optimize your site using SEO basics; that way, your content and website are well adapted to search engine requirements, so you will be rewarded with a higher SEO ranking. Once that is done, you can focus on other marketing techniques, such as paid advertising that will show up as text content on the right hand side of the search results page once relevant keywords have been entered into the search bar.

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The basics of optimizing your website

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The process of starting up your own website may seem like a daunting task at first, and having the potential to be viewed by millions of people on the Internet means that you’ll probably want it to look and work as well as possible. In order to have those millions of people visit your website, however, you will need to be taken seriously by the search engines that will display webpages for potential users to visit. In order to ensure that your website is listed as high as possible in the search results, you will need to optimize your site in order to show the search engine’s algorithm that you are able to offer something worthwhile to the users.


This is where SEO, or Search Engine Optimization’comes in. The ref termers to the practice of revising the content of your website in order to make the experience more user-friendly, and by doing that, increase your chances of being listed in the organic results section that is generated when keywords are typed into the search bar.


Some of the easiest ways for you to increase your rating with search engines like Google or Bing is to make sure that the content on your website is relevant, fresh and accurate. This means that it is important to constantly add new content to make ganging new users easier, as they will tend to return to find new content (no one wants to read the same thing over and over!).


Flooding your website with key words so that the search engine’s algorithm is also quite ineffective, as the algorithms used these days have advanced past reading plain text, and are looking for context.


Making your content easy to read and your page easy to navigate will also go a long way towards increasing your SEO, since clear and value laden URLs, page titles, headings and subheading will not only allow users to navigate directly where they want to go, but it will also give the search engine more to work with when running through results for certain keywords.

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

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The importance of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that should not be overlooked when creating your website, no matter what you’re selling or promoting. In order to get as much traffic to your website as possible, you will need to convince search engines like Google and Bing that your content is well thought out and user-friendly. Learning the basics of SEO will go a long way towards giving your website the best chance of being ranked on the first page of Google or Bing’s search results.

Depending on how you structure the content on your website, search engines will give you a rating that will affect how high your website or content appears on the results page when users search for keywords relevant to your product or service. Since there can potentially be millions of results that appear once the ‘Search’ button is clicked, you’ll want your content to be as visible to users as quickly as possible.

Effective SEO involves every aspect of the website, including the overall performance of the website, how fast it loads content and responds to input, originality of content posted, authority of your website (which us judged by how many other sites use yours as a reference or find your content worthy of linking to), and the user rating, which is based on how easy your content and website is to navigate, how long users stay on the page for,  how safe it is from malware, etc.

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SNAPCHAT: 101

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"Snapchat is a photo messaging application developed by Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy, then Stanford University students.  Using the application, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos are known as "Snaps". Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps (as of December 2013, the range is from 1 to 10 seconds), after which they will be hidden from the recipient's device and deleted from Snapchat's servers." 

Yet there is much more to Snapchat than a simple snap and share.

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How to leverage holidays for your social media campaign

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Many companies use the holiday season, whether its Christmas, Halloween or Valentines Day as a way of getting customers more involved with their products and services. By doing this, they not only allow their customers to interact with them, but they show their clients and potential future clients the lighter side of their business. Here are a few ideas on how you could use the holidays as a marketing tool to help boost your social media coverage and interaction on your pages.

1.     Build up to the day

A lot of people tend to forget about holidays, not because they don’t enjoy them, but simply because we all get so busy doing other things. Use your social media profiles to create a build up to the day for one or two weeks before the time, perhaps with a competition or a series of posts that count down to a climax or a product giveaway, etc. Remember not to go too far overboard too early, since people may get fed up and just ignore your posts until the shenanigans are over.

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How to use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool

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LinkedIn prides itself on being the social network most focused on building a professional presence online. The following is a list of ways in which you could use LinkedIn in order to promote your business to your network and build a strong marketing profile.

1.     Create a strong professional profile

One of the best ways to keep your connections informed about your happenings is by posting ‘status updates.’ Status updates are brief statements that you feel your connections will find useful. In addition, they can include links to related content on your website. To appear active in the LinkedIn community, post useful and actionable status updates on a regular basis. LinkedIn also allows you to easily syndicate your Blog posts to your profile. As you post to your blog on your Website, your LinkedIn profile will be automatically updated with your posts’ title, abstract and link to the full post on your Website.

If you are an active participant in Twitter, you can integrate your LinkedIn status updates with your Tweets to keep your connections and followers informed. LinkedIn makes it easy for you to request recommendations from your connections. A collection of glowing recommendations that underscore your expertise and experience will significantly enhance your profile.


2.     The LinkedIn Community

LinkedIn Groups help you stay informed and keep in touch with people that share your interests. You can create your own LinkedIn groups or join any number of groups that focus on your area of interest or expertise. Participating in LinkedIn Groups by adding value to the discussion is a great way to expand your circle of influence.

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