New to online advertising? This article attempts to help you understand the various terms that are used by online marketing agency, in particular search engine marketing. At the same time we will attempt to bust some myth when it comes to search engine marketing. Do bookmark this page and refer back from time to time as we will continue to update this along the way.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)  refers to the overall marketing on search engine. This includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), and Contextual Advertising.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

This is essentially a paid form of advertising on Search Engine. The result would be displayed under the sponsored listing/result section of the search engine. The three major search engine has their own pay per click system namely: Adwords for google, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) for Yahoo and Microsoft Adcenter for Bing/MSN.

Beside the search result of Google, Yahoo and Bing, your advertisement can appear on sites other site within the content/contextual advertising model that the search engine provides. For example, under Google Display network, you can have your ad appearing on Youtube, Espn soccernet and more.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization or SEO is where a web owner attempts to raise his exposure on the organic/natural listing result of Google. Thou the result is not as immediate as Pay per click, there are certain benefit SEO provides that PPC can never achieve.