SEM is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Marketing; SEM is a form of Internet marketing and seeks to promote websites by increasing their rank in the search engine result pages. The more common ways of doing this would be through paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion. SEO is a term usually included in the industry definitions of SEM.

North American advertisers spent $9.4 billion US dollars on Internet marketing in 2006; this was a large increase by about 62% compared to 2005. Those numbers have been on a steady increase for the past 3 years making SEM one of the most popular forms of advertising today. Due to the complex technology of SEM a search engine optimization market has evolved, because many marketers have difficulty understanding search engine marketing they rely on third party companies to manage their search marketing.

There has been controversy when talking about paid search advertising and the issues are based around how search engines present advertising on their search result pages, these issues have been the target of a series of studies and reports. As a narrow definition the marketing community has accepted the term SEM to be exclusive to Pay Per Click advertising. This definition of the term excludes the more in-depth search marketing community such as search engine optimization and search retargeting which can be more cost effective services.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a paid online advertising service such as “Adwords” or “Overture”. PPC results usually appear as “sponsored links” above or beside the organic search engine results. There are a lot of businesses that choose this option when running an advertising campaign as it is one of the fastest ways to bring in traffic and get top placement on the search engines for a website.