SEM is a part of a bigger picture called online marketing. It is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Don’t mistake SEO with SEM, SEO is only a part of SEM. Maybe we could divide SEM into two parts, free and paid. Where SEO is free and PPC and paid inclusions are off course paid. Note that Google does not offer paid inclusion, but Yahoo does. Also, note that Yahoo has Yahoo search marketing (former Overture). Other search engines may offer paid inclusion, and there are many other pay per click programs, but Google’s and Yahoo’s are the biggest, cheapest, highest quality and best. Although there are some rumors that people that come from MSN search (Live search) are good buyers.

When nobody competes for a keyword it’s easy to be first both in organic and paid results, but when competition is big… Well you just have to do better SEO, and have bigger wallets. This is a very simple term, nothing much to say here.

If you can achieve the first three places for a often search term (keyword, key phrase) this can bring huge number of visitors. It is also important that you rank well for “New York”, not “nevyurk”, I suppose that’s pretty obvious. Watch out for competition. If there are 15.000.000 websites competing for the term you are competing, you are in for a hell of a battle. But 1.000.000 is surely achievable. Competition quality is also playing a high role, and how well optimized competition’s website is.

The most important thing you should know is that SEO is not just writing meta keywords for your site. This is a billion dollar industry, that can make a difference between life and death online, so obviously there is more to it than just. I am glad that you are reading about this, because this makes you my friend. When it comes to meta keywords, only Yahoo takes them into minimal consideration, others don’t even do that.

Other most important thing about SEO is that there is so-called onsite optimization, and the offsite optimization. Onsite optimization is site page structure, headings, bolding, thinking how to name your pages, alternate text on images and everything else that you do on your website that is important for SEO.

Do not call your pages “games, games, games, games” because this is called keyword stuffing is a part of the black hat SEO, and could get you banned on Google. Google is smarter than that, also Google’s policy is relevancy, and if you need to say 4 times “games”, than you probably aren’t relevant for that term. However, if other people call your site “games”, than you probably are!

Off page optimization is considered to be far more important than onpage! So everything that is not directly connected with your site (code, images, text, content) has to do with off page. You need to get other sites to link to you. The more quality sites link to you, the better.

Read more about SEO in its own category.

You create a website full of content about football. You write about balls, goals, shirts, players, accessories and other football interests, after that you signup for Google Adsense. You choose the type, look, position for your Adsense banner. After Google reviews your site, and if they approve it, your Adsense start to show up. Only relevant ads to your site content show up. Remember what I said, that is company’s policy – relevancy! Therefore, if across the country somebody paid their ads to show up on keyword football t-shirt their ad may appear on your site. If you want your ads to show up on somebody’s Adsense you need to signup for Adwords. Adsense is kind of a marketing platform for Adwords.

All this is Adsense for content. You also have a Adsense for search. You install a Google search bar on you site, and when somebody looks for any keyword, appropriate ads show up. Now where is all the monetizing I was talking about? Again like in Adwords, don’t click on your own ads, Google is smarter than that.

When somebody clicks on any ad on your site (content or search) you receive a percentage of value of that ad. Lets say somebody paid for 5$ if anybody clicks on his ad, and that ad shows up on your site, and somebody clicks on that ad. You receive a percentage, a speculative 30% of the click. So you would get 1.5$ on your account. Now you know where Google’s income is coming from. You must remember that if digg.com gets 250.000$ monthly Google probably gets around 525.000$ just from Digg. In addition, all they make directly on Google.com. So remember that Google wants You to make money.

You can receive it by showing ads eCPM (Effective Cost Per Mille), or by receiving clicks CPC (Cost Per Click) I have explained both of those terms. You can read more about Adsense in its own category.

Internet marketing is the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. Internet Marketing includes pay per click advertising, banner ads, e-mail marketing, interactive advertising, search engine marketing (including search engine optimization), blog marketing, and article marketing.

Return on investment or ROI is just that, return you receive on an investment that you made.  ROI is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. Lets make an example in Adwords. If you invested 1000$ in attracting 1000 potential customers to your site, then you need to sell 1001$ worth of goods to make a profit. Right? Well that 1001$ is your ROI (return on investment).

So the best thing to do is to make sure you make those sales so you have a profitable ROI. You will do this by converting visitors into buyers. Percentage of this converting is called conversion rate. Lets say 10 people buy, out of 100 people that visit, this means you have a conversion rate of 10% which is very good! So, conversion rate is a percentage of visitors you manage to convert into buyers! Some of the top selling sites on the internet claim to have a conversion rate of 20%!

So the best thing to do is to make sure you make those sales so you have a profitable ROI. You will do this by converting visitors into buyers. Percentage of this converting is called conversion rate. Lets say 10 people buy, out of 100 people that visit, this means you have a conversion rate of 10% which is very good! So, conversion rate is a percentage of visitors you manage to convert into buyers! Some of the top selling web sites on the internet claim to have a conversion rate of 20%!

Adwords offers pay-per-click PPC advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The Adwords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements rules are strict. They have to be short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines.  Here you can put in good use term niche market. You need to target the right niche market, and the right niche keywords.

If you want to know about Adwords, you need to know about ROI (return on investment), Adsense (another Google service that is directly connected with Adwords), SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (Search engine marketing), SERP (Search engine results page) and other. You have to understand that all this terms evolve around each other.

Adwords is in fact very simple. You know I like examples… You signup, create an ad campaign. Lets say you are in business of selling perfumes, and would like to start online shop with your products. You can choose words, next to which your ads will show. Then when somebody searches “Armani perfume” (which are searched lets say 10 times a day) your ad will show up 200 times a day. The good part is Google charges you only when somebody clicks on your ad.

The cost depends on your campaign budget, number of searches people make, number of words you assign your ads, and number of clicks people make on your add. And most important thing. You know Google is smart, right? Don’t click on your competition ads, don’t click on yours, and don’t write bad ads. Encourage people to click on your ads, and Google will reduce your click cost! Why? Because Google likes relevancy, that’s companies policy. I think I overdid it, I plan to have a special place on this site about Adwords.

A niche marketing is a focused, portion of a market sector that you can take over. Basically you can use this everywhere! For online marketing you can use this when picking keywords or keyphrases on which you wish to target your SEO or when you are creating your adwords campaign. When you are creating you hosting packages, or products in your shop, or what exactly service do you wish to provide.

Niche marketing is the process of finding and serving small but potentially profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or services for them. For big companies those market segments are often too small in order to serve them profitably as they often lack economies of scale. Word of advice, pick a niche that interests you. Because it is hard to write, promote, sell, do anything with a market that doesn’t interest you.

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying a finder’s fee for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per sale), or any combination.

In this marketing anyone who wants can promote your product, and they will be paid appropriately. But some companies care about future and potential costumers so they if promote them they will pay you for every visit, subscriber etc. Pay for performance. I will defiantly try to provide some affiliate marketing companies.

Successful affiliate programs require a lot of maintenance and work. The number of affiliate programs just a few years back was much smaller than it is today. Having an affiliate program that is successful is not as easy anymore. Although some consider affiliate marketing as a hoax, it is a legitimate way to profit and needs hard work.