Search engine marketing is the process of using search engine optimization to make sure that your webpage consistently is at the top of the heap when customers and client do an Internet search for terms that are related to your product or service. When search engines send out spiders or bots to collect information about different websites that is then used to decide which web pages show up first in search listings these spiders and bots are looking for search engine optimized content, or SEO content. SEO content drives search engine marketing by repeating certain keywords or key phrases a certain number of times.

When the search engine spiders and bots pick up those keywords or key phrases then they put that webpage higher in the search listings then pages that don’t have SEO content. SEO has become very important to businesses in the last decade because no matter how much you spend on advertising when you’re doing business on the Web your webpage needs to be at the top of the search listings page. Search engine marketing can target the major search tools that people use like Google or Yahoo so that you can be sure your webpage will show up somewhere near the top whenever anyone searches for a keyword or key phrase that is found on your website.

SEO content needs to be original though, just copying and pasting the same paragraph over and over won’t help you with SEP. The spiders and bots are programmed to not list sites that repeat the same word or the same phrase over and over. So if you were planning on taking one paragraph or one page of content and using that for search engine marketing it won’t work. For effective search engine optimization you need to have original SEO content.

If you want your website to really be successful good SEM is the key. Lots of companies place online ads and online ads can be effective at reaching particular target markets but when it comes to sheer numbers the highest number of hits that you will get to your site will come from SEO content and using search engine optimization in creative ways to get your webpage listed higher up in the search rankings.

Studies have shown that a majority of people will never click past the first page of search results when they search for a certain keyword or phrase so you have to make sure that your webpage is at the top of the search results page in order to get the most visitors to you site who are looking for the product that you sell. Using search engine optimization can be tricky until you get the hang of writing SEO content and using search engine marketing but once you figure out how it all works or hire a professional to show how it all works you’ll be amazed at the increase in traffic to your website that you will see.

You’ve probably come across a doorway page before when you were surfing the Web. Doorway pages are similar to landing pages except doorway pages are practically empty. Doorway page are created specifically to utilize search engine optimization techniques and search engine marketing to get listed in the highest spot possible on search engine results page. Sometimes the person who stumbles onto a doorway page will need to click through the doorway page to get to the actual website that they were trying to get to and sometimes the page uses a Meta refresh, or an HTML code that instantly redirects the reader to another website.

Doorway pages often use a sneaky form of SEO strategies where the text on the page has nothing to do with the actual product that the company is selling but uses popular search terms in an effort to get a higher search engine results.

Doorway pages are essentially a form of the old bait and switch technique. For example if you were looking for a site on natural dog food and you did a Google search for natural dog food and you clicked on the first link at the top of the search engine results page because the description of that site that is listed under the link said that page was about the best kinds of natural dog food. Then after you clicked on that link you were taken to the web site of a nationally known pet food manufacturer who was trying to sell you their new line of natural dog food. That company is using a doorway page as a method of search engine marketing. By using search engine optimized text on the doorway page the company was able to get ranked very high by the search engine spider and was able to draw you in with a search engine marketing article but instantly sent you to their page hoping that you would buy their new dog food line.

Because a lot doorway pages are set up to act essentially as spam and to use any method available to get a particular website to the top of the search engine results page search engine spiders now are on the lookout for doorway page. The search engines will sometimes ban pages that use doorway pages from being indexed or showing up on the search engine results page. Doorway pages that have an instant Meta redirect or Meta refresh are usually not banned by the search engine spiders. Websites that use doorway pages will often use a redirect so that the webpage will still show up on a search engine’s search results page. Some website creators try to get around the ban by creating search engine optimized and content rich doorway pages but the search engine spiders are adapting are now learning how to spot doorway pages that are set up to try and attract web traffic using black hat SEO that has nothing to do with the actual content of the website.

Search engine marketing is a great tool and most play fair. For those who do not beware, the search engines engineers sit around all day figuring out how to stop the cheaters. If you stumble across some “top secret” strategy that someone is trying to sell you, be assured that the search engines already know about and have adjusted their algorithms to deal with it. Instead of wasting time and money, just do it right.