The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

What You Need to Know

Assuming that you have read Chapter 6, The Ubiquitous Blog, and have begun blogging, and read Chapter 18, Spotlight on Search (Search Engine Optimization), and have performed your SEO, your pages are gradually being ranked higher in the organic listings. It’s now time to work on your SEM—or simply, your pay-per-click advertising.

PPC advertising requires that you decide which keywords or keyword phrases you used in your SEO campaign are most important—the ones that best match those that your customer will type into a search engine when trying to find your site. It’s also the words and phrases that come directly from your website’s content—the words you will be able to pay for when a potential customer clicks on your link.

The definition of SEM used in this chapter is relatively generic, because the best way to experience the ease and excitement of creating and managing an SEM campaign is by actually doing it. Also, each search engine is a little different in regard to how you go about creating an account, adding funds to your budget, and reporting on its success.

While there are many providers of PPC, banner advertising, and other pay-for-performance advertisers, Google is by far the largest. According to VentureBeat Digital Media, the top five search engines in market share at the time this chapter was written were as follows: Google 68 percent; Bing/Yahoo! 27.4 percent; with 70 other search engines sharing 4.6 percent. Even with an algorithm and sponsored ...