Search engine marketing campaign (SEM) is an effective tool for business owners to create branding on the Internet and get more quality leads through major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. But for some people, search engine marketing can seems to be a daunting topic for them.

Ever changing technology and algorithms, endless opportunity to advertise and complex solutions all make SEM seems to be a task that is too hard for business owners to handle. However, there are 4 basic tips that you can follow which will make your SEM campaign more effective and eventually achieve your marketing goals.

1. Determine your business and marketing objectives. Before you start any SEM campaign, you will first need to define your marketing objective of your business. Are you trying to use your website to generate more leads for your sales team? Or do you wish to use your website to sell your products and services directly? Or lastly, are you trying to educate your target audience with content on your website? Only once you have define your marketing objective, then you can move on to tip number 2.

2. Draft out your marketing plan. In your plan, it usually consists of 2 elements, which are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising. SEO is to get your website to rank well on the organic listings (left-hand side of result page) of search engines. The organic listing is the “free” area of the search engine result page. As for pay-per-click advertising, it is to have your website shows up on the sponsored area (right-hand side) of the search engine result page. For pay-per-click advertising, you will only pay when someone clicks on your ads and goes to your website.

3. Conduct search engine optimization to your website. Use SEO to optimize a core set of keywords that are closely related to what your business provides. Adhere to current web standard and build all pages with descriptive title and description tags, keyword optimized content and keyword optimized alt tag for all images.

4. Using pay-per-click to target more keywords. As search engine optimization takes time to bring your core keywords up to good ranking, you can use pay-per-click advertising to target your core keywords first before they get to prominent rankings on organic listings. Once your core set of keywords have achieve prominent rankings on organic listings, you can start to leverage on pay-per-click advertising to target more diversified keywords of your business, such as individual product or service.

By planning your search engine marketing campaign with the above 4 tips, you will be able to fully leverage on the search engines and achieve your marketing goals that you have set for your business.

Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of HomeBizGears.com which provides search engine optimization services.

Check out more about Search Engine Optimization at www.homebizgears.com/search-engine-optimization.asp

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