Getting your name out there…all you have to do is pay for it.

Social Media Bible, Chapter 20–Marketing Yourself (Search Engine Marketing)

This is a relatively short chapter because its point is fairly simple: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a way to market your website by paying a fee to the various search engines each time your company shows up in the search results and also when you get a “click through.” A click through, the holy grail of website searches, is when somebody clicks on the link to your site and goes to your site. SEM results are called “sponsored results” when you see them come up on a search engine. My question is: how often do people click on those sponsored results? I sometimes purposely avoid those results, knowing that a company is paying for them to show up, rather than that they may have the most relevance to what I’m looking for. But if this form of SEM didn’t work, I suppose firms wouldn’t use it, would they?

The author explains the process of signing up for the SEM service on several search engine sites, which is actually really simple, and he offers several tips, including a key word macro that is available on The Social Media Bible website to help determine which keywords are the most important on your site.

The “Commandments” at the end of this chapter do a great job of summarizing the important points here, and bringing readers back to important points from previous chapters, such as “Thou Shalt Focus on the WIIFM.” (p. 388)

It’s interesting to see how many Search Engine Marketing firms show up in the “sponsored searches” area when you do a search for Search Engine Marketing. I wonder how much they paid for the “Search Engine Marketing” term to apply to their company?