Search Engine Marketing is a general term which refers to all activities relating to marketing a product on the search results pages of search engines. It is distinct from ‘Web Marketing’ or ‘Digital Marketing’ in that it refers entirely to obtaining traffic and sales as a result of targeting search terms whereas the other two terms refer broadly to any type of marketing (e-mail, banners, social marketing etc) on the Internet. It’s worth noting that as search engines have started to include social results in the SERPS social media marketing will start to fall under the banner of SEM.
Within SEM there are various subsets of expertise. One is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which is the attempt to optimise a site’s on and off site content, profiles and links to improve position in the organic listings. Most often associated with SEM is the use of pay per click advertising and paid inclusion to achieve certain traffic objectives through the paid links sections of search engines results pages – for example through the Google AdWords system.