SEM or Search Engine Marketing is somewhat different from SEO or Search Engine Optimization. SEM basically means marketing your products or services through paid listings and paid rankings in search engines or other such result based derivative products.

SEO is a very good technique to get people to visit your website or web page and enquire regarding your products or services or perhaps get a sale. SEO is when you optimize or make your webpage so friendly for search engines, most particularly google that it appears in the first page (ideally) for a searched keyword, as wanted by you. Unfortunately, this is not very predictable. The best of SEO firms can only give a rough indication of when this will happen and this need to be consistently maintained. If there is someone better than you in making their web page more search engine friendly then of course they will come up in ranking. Also keep in mind that there is likely to be more than one combination of keyword, that many keywords will be very very competitive and that even if you are in the second page of google, you are losing a lot of business as compared to those in the first page.

Then there is the much faster, controllable route of paying the engine to show our ads when a relevant term is searched. This is done by companies wanting to get there quickly, where the keywords are highly competitive, or where company can derive a high level of advantage by targeting the SEM and getting better results. Remember search engines change their ranking formulae quickly and unannounced and it is becoming increasingly difficult to MAINTAIN a great organic search ranking.

Our view:  Our view is that SEM cannot totally replace SEO and visa versa. If your advert copy is compulsive enough when it appears on the Right hand side of paid search results the user is bound to click if he /she sees it. Alternately, users are much more prone to visit the organic search results. Hence a smart company will probably combine the seo and sem techniques in order to receive a good response quickly and maintain that over the long term and build on its brand online.

Is it ? Remember your competitors are bidding for keywords as well, remember there is a combination of targeted geographies, keywords, bid price, ad copy, placement and timing which will determine how many times your ad will be placed, whether placed to the correct set of individuals or not. And not to maintain that ideally this should be maintained constantly to get the best results. And this is just the surface, Search engine rankings and SEM should ideally go hand in hand to achieve the best result and position the brand in long term. This is what we aim to do.

Ergo, SEM needs specialist people with special skills to ensure your money is well spent and targeted customers visit your web site; which is where we come in.

-I know SEM is pay per click , that's not very new , is it ?

Well, crux of SEM is pay per click but it is evolving. All clicks are not equal. Also apart from pay per click there may be a placement model which may work cheap in some categories. And Pay per click is not new, but its constantly evolving.